


























-./-.^r.^*/ VW<v^' \/W/ 



-..-^b 




-.-^o. 

























: ^^-^K \ 



^ •JlZrC.'. 




^ •'•««»'' ^ 






• ^V 



V *- 



► AV 






te %/ :^K' %-o^' Z^^: %/ ;« 






















V^*> "<'**^^*/ V-^-\**' 






FOCH THE MAN 




^C) International Film i,erviee 



Ferdinand Foch 



Showing His Insignia as a Marshal of France, Consisting of 

Seven Stars on Each Sleeve and Four Rows of 

Oak LeavgiS on His Cap. 



FOCH THE MAN 

A Life of 
The Supreme Commander 

of the 

Allied Armies 



BY 

CLARA E. LAUGHLIN 

WITH APPRECIATION BY 

LiEUT.-CoL. EDUOARD RfiQUIN 

of the French High Commission to the United States 
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




New York Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 1918, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



r^ 






'CiHi 



New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 



©CU508812 



DEDICATION 

TO THE MEN WHO HAVE FOUGHT UNDER GENERAL 
FOCH'S command, to all of them, in all GRAT- 
ITUDE. BUT IN AN ESPECIAL WAY TO THE MEN 
OF THE 42D DIVISION, THE SPLENDOR OF 
WHOSE CONDUCT ON SEPTEMBER 9, I914, 
NO PEN WILL EVER BE ABLE ADE- 
QUATELY TO COMMEMORATE. 



MAOT eOMHI«MftlAT' 

Ml* 

ffePUBLIQUe rHAN^AIM 

AUX rrATS-UNIS 

MB4 COLUMBIA ROAD 

T*i.EPHo«e, NONTN s;t4 WASHiNCTON a a 



Chile. 9f7^i^^teyU7^i^le^X^^^h 



Dear Mademoiselle Laughlin : 

I have read with the keenest interest your 
sketch of the life of Marshal Foch. It is not 
yet history : we are too close to events to write 
it now, but it is the story of a great leader of 
men on which I felicitate you because of your 
real understanding of his character. 

Christian, Frenchman, soldier, Foch will be 
held up as an example for future generations 
as much for his high moral standard as for his 
military genius. 

It seems that in writing about him the style 
rises with the noble sentiments which he 
inspires. 

Thus in form of presentation as well as in 
substance you convey admirably the great les- 
son which applies to each one of us from the 
life of Marshal Foch. 

Please accept, Mademoiselle, this expression 
of my respectful regards. 

Lt. Colonel E. Requin. 



CONTENTS 
I. Where He Was Born .... 17 

Stirring traditions and historic scenes which 
surrounded him in childhood. 

II. Boyhood Surroundings . . . .25 

The horsemarkets at Tarbes. The school. 
Foch at twelve a studeat of Napoleon. 

III. A Young Soldier of a Lost Cause . 32 

What Foch suffered in the defeat of France by 
the Prussians. 

IV. Paris after the Germans Left . . 38 

Foch begins his military studies, determined 
to be ready when France should again need 
defense. 
V. Learning to Be a Rough Rider . 46 
Begins to specialize in cavalry training. The 
school at Saumur. 
VI. First Years in Brittany ... S3 
Seven years at Rennes as artillery captain and 
always student of war. Called to Paris for 
further training. 

Vn. JOFFRE AND FoCH 6o 

Parallels in their careers since their school days 
together. 
Vin. The Superior School of War . . 68 
Where Foch's great work as teacher prepared 
hundreds of officers for the superb parts they 
have played in this war. 
IX. The Great Teacher .... 76 
Some of the principles Foch taught. Why he is 
not only the greatest strategist and tactician 
of all time, but the ideal leader and coor- 
dinator of democracy. 
7 



8 CONTENTS 

X. A Colonel at Fifty .... 83 

After nearly thirty years of intense application 
to the study of warfare. Clemenceau's part in 
bringing Foch to the front. 

XI. Fortifying France with Great Prin- 

ciples 92 

How the Superior War Council prepared for the 
inevitable invasion of France; and as part of 
that preparation put Foch in command at 
Nancy where, it was expected, the brunt of 
German attack would fall. 

XII. On the Eve of War 100 

Believing that the best way to defend is to 
attack, he promptly invaded Germany; but 
was obliged to retire and defend his own soil. 

XIII. The Battle of Lorraine . . .108 

How the armies of Lorraine thwarted the 
German plan to envelop the French fighting 
forces and enter Paris in triumph. Brilliant 
generalship there instantly recognized and 
rewarded by JofFre. 

XIV. The First Victory at the Marne . 116 

Explanation of what is commonly called " the 
miracle of the Marne; " how Foch saved the 
day after the Germans had begun to celebrate 
their victory. 

XV. Sent North to Save Channel Ports . 127 

Foch's great foresight and diplomacy in deal- 
ing with grave crisis in Northern France after 
battle of the Marne, evidence his genius as a 
coordinator. 
XVI. The Supreme Commander of the 

Allied Armies 142 

How Foch stopped the great German drive of 
1918. Supreme faith his great support. What 
manner of man he is who has led us to victory. 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 

TO PACK 

Ferdinand Foch Title 

Marshal Joffre — General Foch 60 

General Petain — Marshal Haig — Gen- 
eral Foch — General Pershing 142 

General Foch — General Pershing 148 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 

Three Spirits stood on the mountain peak 

And gazed on a world of red, — 
Red with the blood of heroes. 

The living and the dead; 
A mighty force of Evil strove 

With freemen, mass on mass. 
Three Spirits stood on the mountain peak 

And cried : "They shall not pass !" 

The Spirits of Love and Sacrifice, 

The Spirit of Freedom, too, — 
They called to the men they had dwelt among 

Of the Old World and the New! 
And the men came forth at the trumpet call. 

Yea, every creed and class; 
And they stood with the Spirits who called to them, 

And cried: "They shall not pass!" 

Far down the road of the Future Day 

I see the world of Tomorrow ; 
Men and women at work and play, ' 

In the midst of their joy and sorrow. 
And every night by the red firelight, 

When the children gather 'round 
They tell the tale of the men of old. 
These noble ancestors, grim and bold. 

Who bravely held their ground. 
In thrilling accents they often speak 
Of the Spirits Three on the mountain peak. 

O Freedom, Love and Sacrifice 

You claimed our men, alas! 
Yet everlasting peace is theirs 

Who cried, "They shall not pass!" 

Arthur A. Penn. 

Reprinted T>v permission of M. WitmarJo A Sons, N. T, 
Pullishera of the musical setting to this poem. 



FOREWORD 

SOMEWHERE in France a small, slen- 
der man, who but for the strength 
indicated in his remarkable head would 
look frail, has been the center of all our hopes. 
He is sixty-seven years old — three months 
older than Marshal Joffre — and has been in 
.the thick of the world war's greatest events 
from its beginning. The victory to which he 
has led us is the most stupendous and far- 
reaching in human history. No military com- 
mander since time began ever filled a place 
wherein his ability was of such moment to 
mankind. 

What manner of man is he? Who knows? 
Scarcely anything has been printed in Eng- 
lish about Ferdinand Foch except a few 
analyses of his victories, beginning with the 
first battle of the Marne. 
11 



12 FOREWORD 

Of the man himself and the sixty-three 
years of preparation which made him ready 
to save France and her allies, little is known. 

I do not believe that this is because Marshal 
Foch considers his years of growth to be no 
proper concern of the world. 

He is the last man who could conceivably 
take such a stand. For no one knows so well 
as he what the intensive study of other com- 
manders has been to him. And no one knows 
so well as he what his interpretation of history 
and military biography has been to those stu- 
dents of his who have proved such able 
lieutenants because of their unity of ideals 
with their old instructor. 

His life prior to August, 1914, is what might 
be called uneventful; yet it is tremendously 
significant. There is scarcely a page out of it 
that does not glow in the light of recent events. 

Moreover, it is a life-story whose great ani- 
mating principles are of superb value to every 
one of us, no matter what our walk in life 
nor how remote from battlefields it may be. 
No one can study the way Marshal Foch came 
to greatness without bettering his own cam- 



FOREWORD 13 

paign of life and bringing himself closer to 
victory. 

In due course we shall have many volumes 
about him: his life, his teachings, his great 
deeds will be studied in minutest details as long 
as that civilization endures which he did so 
much to preserve to mankind. But just now, 
there is so little accessible to tell us what 
manner of man he is, that I am ventur- 
ing to offer American readers this exceed- 
ingly modest volume. The hour which it 
may serve is a great hour — one of the greatest 
in human history. And I cannot help thinking 
that to know a little about Foch now should 
have its value for us — as well as to know a 
great deal about him later on. 

My sources of information are mainly 
French; and notable among them is a work 
recently published in Paris: 'Toch, His Life, 
His Principles, His Work, as a Basis for Faith 
in Victory," by Rene Puaux, a French soldier- 
author who has served under the supreme com- 
mander in a capacity which enabled him to 
study the man as well as the general. To M. 
Puaux I am indebted for those main facts of 



14 FOREWORD 

General Foch*s life on which I base this sketch. 

French, English, and some few American 
periodicals have given me bits of impression 
and some information. French military writ- 
ers who have published analyses of this war's 
campaigns have also helped. And noted war 
correspondents have contributed graphic frag- 
ments. The happy fortune which permitted 
me to know France, her history and her people, 
enabled me to "read into" these brief accounts 
much which does not appear to the reader 
without that acquaintance. 

I am a student of history, of biography, but 
not (save as we all have become) of war. 
I have had no first-hand knowledge of the 
great commander. I re-tell what I have been 
privileged to read about him, in my own way 
and with such comments as I might make in 
talking these things over with a friend. 

I offer the little outline simply for what it 
is, without pretense. 

The chapters were written at the instance 
of Mr. W. A. Curley, who has given me 
opportunity and warm encouragement to write 



FOREWORD 15 

much about France and her people. I am glad 
to acknowledge my gratefulness to him. 

M. Puaux's book was brought to me by M. 
Antonin Barthelemy, French consul at Chi- 
cago, the extent and quality of whose helpful- 
ness I shall never be able to describe. 

To M. Barthelemy I am indebted for the 
kind interest in my endeavor taken by Lieu- 
tenant Colonel Eduoard Requin of the French 
General Staff and now of the French High 
Commission to the United States. Colonel 
Requin was one of the staff officers of the 
Ninth Army from the day General Foch took 
command of it; and in the great events that 
followed, he was almost constantly at General 
Foch*s side or executing his orders. It was, 
indeed, to Colonel Requin's knowledge of Gen- 
eral Foch, that M. Puaux was indebted for 
much of the material in his excellent book. 
So I hold myself extraordinarily fortunate to 
have had the kind interest of Colonel Requin 
in my undertaking. I am deeply grateful to 
him for a number of most helpful suggestions. 



16 FOREWORD 

All hall to the military genius who reorgan- 
ized our armies in the face of a flushed and 
triumphant foe, and striking with consummate 
skill, blow after blow, freed the world of its 
most dangerous exponents of autocracy and 
militarism, exploded the unholy fallacy that 
right is simply a synonym of might and brought 
to pass the dawning of a day of peace that 
has made the world safe for democracy ! 



WHERE HE WAS BORN 

FERDINAND FOCH was born at 
Tarbes on October 2, 185 1. 
His father, of good old Pyrenean 
stock and modest fortune, was a provincial 
official whose office corresponded to that of 
secretar}^ of state for one of our common- 
wealths. So the family lived in Tarbes, the 
capital of the department called the Upper 
Pyrenees. 

The mother of Ferdinand was Sophie Dupre, 
born at Argeles, twenty miles south of Tarbes, 
nearer the Spanish border. Her father had 
been made a chevalier of the empire by Napo- 
leon I for services in the war with Spain, 
and the great Emperor's memory was piously 
venerated in Sophie Dupre's new home as it 
had been in her old one. So her first-born 
17 



18 FOCH THE MAN 

son may be said to have inherited that passion 
for Napoleon which has characterized his life 
and played so great a part in making him what 
he is. 

There was a little sister in the family which 
welcomed Ferdinand. And in course of time 
two other boys came. 

These four children led the ordinary life 
of happy young folks in France. But there 
was much in their surroundings that was richly 
colorful, romantic. Probably they took it all 
for granted, the way children (and many who 
are not children) take their near and intimate 
world. But even if they did, it must have had 
its deep effect upon them. 

To begin with, there was Tarbes. 

Tarbes is a very ancient city. It is twenty- 
five miles southeast of Pau, where Henry of 
Navarre made his dramatic entry upon a highly 
dramatic career, and just half that distance 
northeast of Lourdes, whose famous pilgrim- 
ages began when Ferdinand Foch was a little 
boy of seven. 

He must have heard many soul-stirring 
tales about little Bernadette, the peasant girl 



WHERE HE WAS BORN 19 

to whom the grotto's miraculous qualities were 
revealed by the Virgin, and whose stories were 
weighed by the Bishop of Tarbes before the 
Catholic Church sponsored them. The proces- 
sion of sufferers through Tarbes on their way 
to Lourdes, and the joyful return of many, 
must have been part of the background of 
Ferdinand Foch's young days. 

Many important highways converge at 
Tarbes, which lies in a rich, elevated plain on 
the left bank of the River Adour. 

The town now has some 30,000 inhabitants, 
but when Ferdinand Foch was a little boy it 
had fewer than half that many. 

For many centuries of eventful history it 
has consisted principally of one very long 
street, running east and west over so wide a 
stretch of territory that the town was called 
Tarbes-the-Long. Here and there this "main 
street" is crossed by little streets running north 
and south and giving glimpses of mountains, 
green fields and orchards; and many of these 
are threaded by tiny waterways — small, mean- 
dering children of the Adour, which take them- 
selves where they will, like the chickens in 



20 FOCH THE MAN 

France, and nobody minds having to step over 
or around them, or building his house to humor 
their vagaries. 

Tarbes was a prominent city of Gaul under 
the Romans. They, who could always be 
trusted to make the most of anything of the 
nature of baths, seem to have been duly appre- 
ciative of the hot springs in which that region 
abounds. 

But nothing of stirring importance happened 
at or near Tarbes until after the battle of 
Poitiers (732), when the Saracens were fall- 
ing back after the terrible defeat dealt them 
by Charles Martel. 

Sullen and vengeful, they were pillaging 
and destroying as they went, and probably 
none of the communities through which they 
passed felt able to offer resistance to their 
depredations — until they got to Tarbes. And 
there a valiant priest named Missolin hastily 
assembled some of the men of the vicinity and 
gave the infidels a good drubbing — killing 
many and hastening the flight, over the moun- 
tains, of the rest. 

This encounter took place on a plain a little 



WHERE HE WAS BORN 21 

to the south of Tarbes which is still called 
the Heath of the Moors. 

When Ferdinand Foch was a little boy, 
more than eleven hundred years after that 
battle, it was not uncommon for the spade or 
plowshare of some husbandman on the heath 
to uncover bones of Christian or infidel slain 
in what was probably the last conflict fought 
on French soil to preserve France against the 
Saracens. And there may still have been liv- 
ing some old, old men or women who could 
tell Ferdinand stories of the 24th of May 
(anniversary of the battle) as it was observed 
each year until the Revolution of 1789. At the 
southern extremity of the battlefield there 
stood for many generations a gigantic eques- 
trian statue, of wood, representing the holy 
warrior, Missolin, rallying his flock to rout the, 
unbelievers. And in the presence of a great 
concourse singing songs of grateful praise to 
Missolin, his statue was crowned with garlands 
by young maidens wearing the picturesque gala 
dress of that vicinity. 

Some forty-odd years after Missolin^s vic- 
tory, Charlemagne went with his twelve knights 



22 FOCH THE IVIAN 

and his great army through Tarbes on his way 
to Spain to fight the Moors. And when that 
ill-starred expedition was defeated and its war- 
riors bold were fleeing back to France, Roland 
— so the story goes — finding no pass in the 
Pyrenees where he needed one desperately, 
cleaved one with his sword Durandal. 

High up among the clouds (almost 10,000 
feet) is that Breach of Roland — 200 feet wide, 
330 feet deep, and 165 feet long. A good 
slice-out for a single stroke! And when Ro- 
land had cut it, he dashed through it and across 
the chasm, his horse making a clean jump to 
the French side of the mountains. That 
no one might ever doubt this, the horse 
thoughtfully left the impress of one iron-shod 
hoof clearly imprinted in the rock just where 
he cleared it, and where it is still shown to the 
curious and the stout of wind. 

It is a pity to remember that, in spite of such 
prowess of knight and devotion of beast, Ro- 
land perished on his flight from Spain. 

But, like all brave warriors, he became 
mightier in death even than he had been in life, 
and furnished an ideal of valor which ani- 



WHERE HE WAS BORN 23 

mated the most chivalrous youth of all Europe, 
throughout many centuries. 

With such traditions is the country round 
about Tarbes impregnated. 

It has been suggested that the name Foch 
(which, by the way, is pronounced as if it 
rhymed with "hush") is derived from Foix — 
a town some sixty miles east of St. Gaudens, 
near which was the ancestral home of the Foch 
family. 

Whatever the relatives of Ferdinand may 
have thought of this as a probability, it is cer- 
tain that Ferdinand was well nurtured in the 
history of Foix and especially in those phases 
of it that Froissart relates. 

Froissart, the genial gossip who first 
courted the favor of kings and princes and 
then was gently entreated by them so that his 
writing of them might be to their renown, was 
on his way to Blois when he heard of the mag- 
nificence of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. 
Whereupon the chronicler turned him about 
and jogged on his way to Foix. Gaston 
Phoebus was not there, but at Orthez — 150 
miles west and north — and, nothing daunted. 



M FOCH THE MAN 

to Orthez went Froissart, by way of Tarbes, 
traveling in company with a knight named 
Espaing de Lyon, who was a graphic and 
charmful raconteur thoroughly acquainted 
with the country through which they were 
journeying. A fine, "that-reminds-me" gentle- 
man was Espaing, and every turn of the road 
brought to his mind some stirring tale or 
doughty legend. 

"Sainte Marie!'* Froissart cried. "How 
pleasant are your tales, and how much do they 
profit me while you relate them. They shall 
all be set down in the history I am writing." 

So they were ! And of all Froissart's incom- 
parable recitals, none are more fascinating 
than those of the countryside Ferdinand Foch 
grew up in. 



II 

BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS 

THE country round about Tarbes has 
long been famed for its horses of 
an Arabian breed especially suitable 
for cavalry. 

Practically all the farmers of the region 
raised these fine, fleet animals. There was a 
great stud-farm on the outskirts of town, and 
the business of breeding mounts for France's 
soldiers was one of the first that little Ferdi- 
nand Foch heard a great deal about. 

He learned to ride, as a matter of course, 
when he was very young. And all his life he 
has been an ardent and intrepid horseman. 

A community devoted to the raising of fine 
saddle horses is all but certain to be a com- 
munity devotedly fond of horse racing. 

Love of racing is almost a universal trait 

25 



£6 FOCH THE MAN 

in France; and in Tarbes it was a feature of 
the town life in which business went hand-in- 
hand with pleasure. 

In an old French book published before Fer- 
dinand Foch was born, I have found the fol- 
lowing description of the crowds which flocked 
into Tarbes on the days of the horse markets 
and races: 

"On these days all the streets and public 
squares are flooded with streams of curious 
people come from all corners of the Pyrenees 
and exhibiting in their infinite variety of type 
and costume all the races of the southern prov- 
inces and the mountains. 

"There one sees the folk of Provenge, iras- 
cible, hot-headed, of vigorous proportions and 
lusty voice, passionately declaiming about 
something or other, in the midst of small 
groups of listeners. 

"There are men of the Basque province — 
small, muscular and proud, agile of movement 
and with bodies beautifully trained; plain of 
speech and childlike in deed. 

"There are the men of the Bearnais, mostly 
from towns of size and circumstance — edu- 



BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS 27 

cated men, of self-command, tempering the 
southern warmth which burns in their eyes 
by the calm intelligence born of experience in 
life and also by a natural languor like that of 
their Spanish neighbors. 

"There are the old Catalonians, whose fea- 
tures are of savage strength under the thick 
brush of white hair falling about their leather- 
colored faces; the men of Navarre, with 
braided hair and other evidences of primitive- 
ness — ^vigorous of build and handsome of fea- 
ture, but withal a little subnormal in expres- 
sion. 

"Then, in the midst of all these character- 
istic types, moving about in a pell-mell fashion, 
making a constantly changing mosaic of vivid 
hues, there are the inhabitants of the innumer- 
able valleys around Tarbes itself, each of them 
with its own peculiarities of costume, manners, 
speech, which make them easily distinguishable 
one from another.'* 

It was a remarkable crowd for a little boy 
to wander in. 

If Ferdinand Foch had been destined to be 
a painter or a writer, the impressions made 



28 FOCH THE IMAN 

upon his childish mind by that medley of 
strange folk might have been passed on to us 
long ago on brilliant canvas or on glowing 
page. 

But that was not the way it served him. 

I want you who are interested to compre- 
hend Ferdinand Foch, to think of those old 
horsef airs and race meets of his Gascony child- 
hood, and the crowds of strange types they 
brought to Tarbes, when we come to the great 
days of his life that began in 19 14 — the days 
when his comprehension of many types of men, 
his abihty to "get on with" them and harmo- 
nize them with one another, meant almost as 
much to the world as his military genius. 

Tarbes had suffered so much in civil and 
religious wars, for many centuries, that not 
many of her ancient buildings were left. The 
old castle, with its associations with the Black 
Prince and other renowned warriors, was a 
ramshackle prison in Ferdinand Foch's youth. 
The old palace of the bishops was used as the 
prefecture, where Ferdinand's father had his 
office. 



BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS 29 

There were two old churches, much restored 
and of no great beauty, but very dear to the 
people of Tarbes nevertheless. 

Ferdinand and his brothers and sister were 
very piously reared, and at an early age 
learned to love the church and to seek it for 
exaltation and consolation. 

Later on in these chapters we shall see that 
phase of a little French boy's training in its 
due relation to a marechal of France, directing 
the greatest army the world has ever seen. 

The college of Tarbes, where Ferdinand 
began his school days, was in a venerable build- 
ing over whose portal there was, in Latin, an 
inscription recording the builder's prayer: 

"May this house remain standing until the 
ant has drunk all the waves of the sea and the 
tortoise has crawled round the world." 

Ferdinand was a hard student, serious be- 
yond his years, but not conspicuous except for 
his earnestness and diligence. 

When he was twelve years old, his fervor 
for Napoleon led him to read Thiers' "History 
of the Consulate and the Empire." And about 



30 FOCH THE MAN 

this time his professor of mathematics re- 
marked of him that ''he has the stuff of a 
poly technician." 

The vacations of the Foch children were 
passed at the home of their paternal grand- 
parents in Valentine, a large village about two 
miles from the town of St. Gaudens in the 
foothills of the Pyrenees. There they had the 
country pleasures of children of good circum- 
stances, in a big, substantial house and a 
vicinity rich in tranquil beauty and outdoor 
opportunities. And there, as in the children's 
own home at Tarbes, one was ashamed not to 
be a very excellent child, and, so, worthy to be 
descended from a chevalier of the great 
Napoleon. 

In the mid-sixties the family moved from 
Tarbes to Rodez — almost two hundred miles 
northeast of their old locality in which both 
parents had been born and where their an- 
cestors had long lived. 

It was quite an uprooting — due to the 
father's appointment as paymaster of the 
treasury at Rodez — ^and took the Foch family 
into an atmosphere very different from that 



BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS 31 

of their old Gascon home, but one which also 
helped to vivify that history which was Fer- 
dinand's passion. 

There Ferdinand continued his studies, as 
also at Saint-£tienne, near Lyons, whither the 
family moved in 1867 when the father was 
appointed tax collector there. 

And in 1869 he was sent to Metz, to the 
Jesuit College of Saint Clement, to which stu- 
dents flocked from all parts of Europe. 

He had been there a year and had been 
given, by unanimous vote of his fellow stu- 
dents, the grand prize for scholarly qualities, 
when the Franco-Prussian war began. 

Immediately Ferdinand Foch enlisted for 
the duration of the war. 



Ill 

A YOUNG SOLDIER OF A LOST CAUSE 

THERE is nothing to record of Fer- 
dinand Foch's first soldiering except 
that from the depot of the Fourth 
Regiment of Infantry, in his home city of 
Saint-£tienne, he was sent to Chalon-sur- 
Saone, and there was discharged in January, 
1871, after the capitulation of Paris. 

He did not distinguish himself in any way. 
He was just one of a multitude of youths who 
rushed to the colors when France called, and 
did what they could in a time of sad confu- 
sion, when a weak government had paralyzed 
the effectiveness of the army — of the nation! 

Whatever blows Ferdinand Foch struck in 
1870 were without weight in helping to avert 
France's catastrophe. But he was like hun- 
dreds of thousands of other young Frenchmen 
similarly powerless in this : In the anguish he 



A YOUNG SOLDIER 33 

suffered because of what he could not do to 
save France from humiliation were laid the 
foundations of all that he has contributed to 
the glory of new France. 

At the time when his Fall term should have 
been beginning at Saint Clement's College, 
Metz was under siege by the German army, 
and its garrison and inhabitants were suffer- 
ing horribly from hunger and disease; Paris 
was surrounded; the German headquarters 
were at Versailles ; and the imperial standards 
so dear to young Foch because of the great 
Napoleon were forever lowered when the 
white flag was hoisted at Sedan and an Em- 
peror with a whole army passed into captivity. 

How much the young soldier-student of the 
Saone comprehended then of the Heedlessness 
of the shame and surrender of those inglorious 
days we do not know. He cannot have been 
sufficiently versed in military understanding to 
realize how much of the defeat France suffered 
was due to her failure to fight on, at this junc- 
ture and that, when a stiffer resistance would 
have turned the course of events. 

But if he did not know then, he certainly 



34 FOCH THE MAN 

knew later. And as soon as he got where he 
could impress his convictions upon other sol- 
diers of the new France he began training 
them in his great maxim: "A battle is lost 
when you admit defeat." 

What his devotion to Saint Clement's Col- 
lege was we may know from the fact of his 
return there to resume his interrupted studies 
under the same teachers, but in sadly different 
circumstances. 

He found German troops quartered in parts 
of the college, and as he went to and from his 
classes the young man who had just laid off 
the uniform of a French soldier was obliged 
to pass and repass men of the victorious army 
of occupation. 

The memory of his shame and suffering on 
those occasions has never faded. How much 
France and her allies owe to it we shall never 
be able to estimate. 

For the effect on Foch was one of the first 
acid tests in which were revealed the quality 
of his mind and soul. Instead of offering him- 
self a prey to sullen anger and resentment, or 
of flaring into fury when one time for fury 



A YOUNG SOLDIER 35 

was past and another had not yet come, he 
used his sorrow as a goad to study, and bent 
his energies to the discovery of why France 
had failed and why Prussia had won. His 
analysis of those reasons, and his application 
of what that analysis taught him, is what has 
put him where he is to-day — and us where 
ive are! 

From Metz, FocH went to Nancy to take his 
examination for the Polytechnic at Paris. 

Just why this should have been deemed 
necessary I have not seen explained. But it 
was, like a good many other things of apparent 
inconsequence in this young man's life, des- 
tined to leave in him an impress which had 
much to do with what he was to perform. 

I have seldom, if ever, studied a life in 
which events "link up" so marvelously and the 
present is so remarkably an extension of the 
past. 

Nancy had been chosen by General Manteuf- 
fel, commander of the First German Army 
Corps, as headquarters, pending the withdrawal 
of the victors on the payment of the last sou in 
the billion-dollar indemnity they exacted of 



36 FOCH THE MAN 

France along with the ceding of Alsace- 
Lorraine. (For three years France had to en- 
dure the insolent victors upon her soil.) 

And with the fine feeling and magnanimity 
in which the German was then as now pecu- 
liarly gifted General Manteuffel delighted in 
ordering his military bands to play the "Re- 
treat" — to taunt the sad inhabitants with this 
reminder of their army's shame. 

Ferdinand Foch listened and thought and 
wrote his examinations for the school of war. 

Forty-two years later — in August, 19 13 — a. 
new commandant came to Nancy to take con- 
trol of the Twentieth Army Corps, whose po- 
sition there, guarding France's Eastern fron- 
tier, was considered one of the most important 
— if not the most important — to the safety 
of the nation. 

The first order he gave was one that brought 
out the full band strength of six regiments 
quartered in the town. They were to play the 
"March Lorraine" and the "Sambre and 
Meuse." They were to fill Nancy with these 
stirring sounds. The clarion notes carrying 
these martial airs were to reach every cranny 



A YOUNG SOLDIER 37 

of the old town. It was a veritable tidal wave 
of triumphant sound that he wanted — for it 
had much to efface. 

Nancy will never forget that night ! It was 
Saturday, the 23d of August, 1913. And the 
new commandant's name was Ferdinand Foch ! 

Less than a year later he was fighting to save 
Nancy, and what lay beyond, from the Ger- 
mans. 

And this time there was to be a different 
story ! Ferdinand Foch was foremost of those 
who assured it. 



IV 

PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT 

FERDINAND FOCH entered the Poly- 
technic School at Paris on the ist of 
November, 1871, just after he had 
completed his twentieth year. 

This school, founded in 1794, is for the 
technical education of military and naval en- 
gineers, artillery officers, civil engineers in 
government employ, and telegraphists — not 
mere operators, of course, but telegraph engi- 
neers and other specialists in electric commu- 
nication. It is conducted by a general, on 
military principles, and its students are soldiers 
on their way to becoming officers. 

Its buildings cover a considerable space in 
the heart of the great school quarter of Paris. 

The Sorbonne, with its traditions harking 
back to St. Louis (more than six centuries) 
and its swarming thousands of students, is 

38 



PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT 39 

hard by the Polytechnic. So is the College de 
France, founded by Francis I. And, indeed, 
whichever way one turns, there are schools, 
schools, schools — of fine arts and applied arts ; 
of medicine in all its branches; of mining and 
engineering; of war; of theology; of lan- 
guages; of commerce in its higher develop- 
ments; of pedagogy; and what-not. 

Nowhere else in the world is there possible 
to the young student, come to advance himself 
in his chosen field of knowledge, quite such a 
thrill as that which must be his when he ma- 
triculates at one of the scores of educational 
institutions in that quarter of Paris to which 
the ardent, aspiring youth of all the western 
world have been directing their eager feet from 
time immemorial. 

Cloistral, scholastic atmosphere, with its 
grave beauty, as at Oxford and Cambridge, he 
will not find in the Paris Latin Quarter. 

Paris does not segregate her students. Con- 
ceiving them to be studying for life, she aids 
them to do it in the midst of life marvelously 
abundant. They do not go out of the world — 
so to speak — to learn to live and work in the 



40 FOCH THE MAN 

world. They go, rather, into a life of ex- 
traordinary variety and fullness, out of which 
— it is expected — they will discover how to 
choose whatever is most needful to their suc- 
cess and well-being. 

There is no feeling of being shut in to a 
term of study. There is, rather, the feeling 
of being "turned loose" in a place of vast op- 
portunity of which one may make as much 
use as he is able. 

To a young man of Ferdinand Foch's natu- 
rally serious mind, deeply impressed by his 
country's tragedy, the Latin Quarter of Paris 
in those Fall days of 1871 was a sober place 
indeed. 

Beautiful Paris, that Napoleon III had done 
so much to make splendid, was scarred and 
seared on every hand by the German bombard- 
ment and the fury of the communards, who 
had destroyed nearly two hundred and fifty 
public and other buildings. The government of 
France had deserted the capital and moved to 
Versailles — ^just evacuated by the Germans. 

The blight of defeat lay on everything. 

In May, preceding Foch's advent, the com- 



PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT 41 

munards — led by a miserable little shoemaker 
who talked about shooting all the world — took 
possession of the buildings belonging to the 
Polytechnic, and were dislodged only after 
severe fighting by Marshal MacMahon's Ver- 
sailles troops. 

The cannon of the communards, set on the 
heights of Pere-Lachaise (the great city of the 
dead where the slumber of so many of earth's 
most illustrious imposed no respect upon the 
"Bolsheviki" of that cataclysm) aimed at the 
Pantheon, shot short and struck the Polytech- 
nic. One shell burst in the midst of an impro- 
vised hospital there, gravely wounding a nurse. 

At last, on May 24, the Polytechnic was 
taken from the revolutionists by assault, and 
many of the communards were seized. 

In the days following, the great recreation 
court of the school was the scene of innumer- 
able executions, as the wretched revolutionists 
paid the penalty of their crimes before the 
firing squad. And the students* billiard room 
was turned into a temporary morgue, filled 
with bodies of those who had sought to de- 
stroy Paris from within. 



42 FOCH THE MAN 

The number of Parisians slain in those days 
after the second siege of Paris has been vari- 
ously estimated at from twenty thousand to 
thirty-six thousand. And all the while, en- 
camped upon the heights round about Paris, 
were victorious German troops squatting like 
Semitic creditors in Russia, refusing to budge 
till their account was settled to the last far- 
thing of extortion. 

The most sacred spot in Paris to young 
Foch, in all the depression he found there, was 
undoubtedly the great Dome des Invalides, 
where, bathed in an unearthly radiance and 
surrounded by faded battle flags, lies the great 
porphyry sarcophagus of Napoleon I. 

With what bitter reflections must the young 
man who had been nurtured in the adoration 
of Bonaparte have returned from that majestic 
tomb to the Polytechnic School for Warriors 
— to which, on the day after his coronation as 
Emperor, Napoleon had given the following 
motto : 

"Science and glory — all for country." 

3ut, also, what must have been the young 
southerner's thought as he lifted his gaze on 



PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT 43 

entering the Polytechnic and read there that 
self -same wish which was inscribed over the 
door of his first school in Tarbes: 

"May this house remain standing until the 
ant has drunk all the waves of the sea and the 
tortoise has crawled round the world." 

The edifice in which part of the Polytechnic 
was housed was the ancient College of Na- 
varre, and a Navarrias poet of lang syne li-^d 
given to the Paris school for his countrymen 
this quaint wish, repeated from the inscription 
he knew at Tarbes. 

France had had twelve different govern- 
ments in fourscore years when Ferdinand Foch 
came to study in that old building which had 
once been the college of Navarre. Houses of 
cards rather than houses of permanence 
seemed to characterize her. 

Yet she has always had her quota — 2l larger 
one, too, than that of any other country — of 
those who look toward far to-morrows and 
seek to build substantially and beautifully for 
them. 

That forward-looking prayer of old Na- 
varre, and recollection of the centuries during 



44 FOCH THE MAN 

which it had prevailed against destroying 
forces, was undoubtedly an aid and comfort 
to the heavy-hearted youth who then and there 
set himself to the study of that art of war 
wherewith he was to serve France. 

Among the two hundred and odd fellow- 
students of Foch at the Polytechnic was 
another young man from the south — almost 
a neighbor of his and his junior by just three 
months — ^Jacques Joseph Cesaire Joffre, who 
had entered the school in 1869, interrupted his 
studies to go to war, and resumed them shortly 
before Ferdinand Foch entered the Poly- 
technic. 

Joffre graduated from the Polytechnic on 
September 21, 1872, and went thence to the 
School of Applied Artillery at Fontainebleau. 

Foch left the Polytechnic about six months 
later, and also went to Fontainebleau for the 
same special training that Joffre was taking. 

Both young men were hard students and tre- 
mendously in earnest. Both were heavy- 
hearted for France. Both hoped the day would 
come when they might serve her and help to 



PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT 45 

restore to her that of which she had been de- 
spoiled. 

But if any one, indulging in the fantastic 
extravagancies of youth, had ventured to fore- 
cast, then, even a tithe of what they have been 
called to do for France, he would have been 
set down as madder than March hares know 
how to be. 



LEARNING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER 

WHEN Ferdinand Foch graduated, 
third in his class, from the artil- 
lery school at Fontainebleau, in- 
stead of seeking to use what influence he might 
have commanded to get an appointment in 
some garrison where the town life or social 
life was gay for young officers, he asked to be 
sent back to Tarbes. 

No one, to my knowledge, has advanced an 
explanation for this move. 

To so earnest and ambitious a student of 
military art (Foch will not permit us to speak 
of it as "military science") sentimental reasons 
alone would never have been allowed to con- 
trol so important a choice. 

That he always ardently loved the Pyrenean 
country, we know. But to a young officer of 
46 



LEAENING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER 47 

such indomitable purpose as his was, even then, 
it would have been inconceivable that he 
should elect to spend his first years out of 
school in any other place than that one where 
he saw the maximum opportunity for develop- 
ment. 

"Development," mind you — not just "ad- 
vancement." For Foch is, and ever has been, 
the kind of man who would most abhor being 
advanced faster than he developed. 

He would infinitely rather be prepared for 
a promotion and fail to get it than get a pro- 
motion for which he was not thoroughly pre- 
pared. 

Nor is he the sort of individual who can 
comfortably deceive himself about his fitness. 
He sustains himself by no illusions of the 
variety: "If I had so-and-so to do, I'd prob- 
ably get through as well as nine-tenths of com- 
manders would." 

He is much more concerned to satisfy him- 
self that his thoroughness is as complete as he 
could possibly have made it, than he is to "get 
by" and satisfy the powers that be ! 

So we Ivnow that it wasn't any mere longing 



48 FOCH THE MAN 

for the scenes of his happy childhood which 
directed his choice of Tarbes garrison when 
he left the enchanting region of Fontainebleau, 
with its fairy forest, its delightful old town, 
and its many memories of Napoleon. 

His mind seems to have been fixed upon a 
course involving more cavalry skill than was 
his on graduating. And after two years at 
Tarbes, with much riding of the fine horses of 
Arabian breed which are the specialty of that 
region, he went to the Cavalry School at Sau- 
mur, on the Loire. 

King Rene of Anjou, whose chronic poverty 
does not seem to have interfered with his taste 
for having innumerable castles, had one at 
Saumur, and it still dominates the town and 
lends it an air of medievalism. 

Toward the end of the sixteenth century 
Saumur was one of the chief strongholds of 
Protestantism in France and the seat of a Prot- 
estant university. 

But the revocation of the Edict of Nantes 
granting tolerance to the Huguenots, brought 
great reverses upon Saumur, whose inhabitants 
were driven into exile. And thereupon ( 1685), 



LEARNING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER 49 

the town fell into a decline which was not 
arrested until Louis XV, in the latter part of 
his reign, caused this cavalry school to be es- 
tablished there. 

It is a large school, with about four hundred 
soldiers always in training as cavalry officers 
and army riding masters. And the riding ex- 
hibitions which used to be given there in the 
latter part of August were brilliant affairs, 
worth going many miles to see. 

There Ferdinand Foch studied cavalry tac- 
tics, practiced "rough riding" and — by no 
means least important — learned to know an- 
other type of Frenchman, the men of old 
Anjou. 

In our own country of magnificent distances 
and myriad racial strains we are apt to think of 
French people as a single race: "French is 
French." 

This is very wide of the truth. French they 
all are, in sooth, with an intense national unity 
surpassed nowhere on earth if, indeed, it is 
anywhere equaled. But almost every one of 
them is intensely a provincial, too, and very 
"set" in the ways of his own section of country 



50 FOCH THE MAN 

— which, usually, has been that of his forbears 
from time immemorial. 

In the description I quoted in the second 
chapter, showing some of the types from the 
vicinity of Tarbes which frequent its horse 
market, one may get some idea of the extraor- 
dinary differences in the men of a single small 
region which is bordered by many little 
"pockets" wherein people go on and on, age 
after age, perpetuating their special traits 
without much admixture of other strains. 

Not every part of France has so much va- 
riety in such small compass. But every prov- 
ince has its distinctive human qualities. And 
between the Norman and the Gascon, the Bre- 
ton and the Provencal, the man of Picardy and 
the man of Languedoc, there are greater tem- 
peramental differences than one can find any- 
where else on earth in an equal number of 
square miles — except in some of our American 
cities. 

To the commander of General Foch's type 
(and as we begin to study his principles we 
shall, I believe, see that they apply to command 
in civil no less than in military life) knowledge 



LEARNING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER 51 

of different men's minds and the way they 
work is absolutely fundamental to success. 

And his preparation for this mastery was 
remarkably thorough. 

At Saumur he learned not only to direct 
cavalry operations, but to know the Angevin 
characteristics. 

In each school he attended, beginning with 
Metz, he had close class association with men 
from many provinces, men of many types. 
And this was valuable to him in preparing him 
to command under-officers in whom a rigorous 
uniformity of training could not obliterate 
bred-in-the-bone differences. 

Many another young officer bent on "getting 
on" in the army would have felt that what he 
learned among his fellow officers of the pro- 
vincial characteristics was enough. 

But not so Ferdinand Foch. 

Almost his entire comprehension of war is 
based upon men and the way they act under 
certain stress — not the way they might be ex- 
pected to act, but the way they actually do act, 
and the way they can be led to act under cer- 
tain stimulus of soul. 



52 FOCH THE MAN 

For Ferdinand Foch wins victories with 
men's souls — not just with their flesh and 
blood, nor even with their brains. 

And to command men's souls it is necessary 
to understand them. 



VI 

FIRST YEARS IN BRITTANY 

UPON leaving the cavalry school at 
Saumur, in 1878, Ferdinand Foch 
went, with the rank of captain of 
the Tenth Regiment of Artillery, to Rennes, 
the ancient capital of Brittany and the head- 
quarters of France's tenth army corps. 

He stayed at Rennes, as an artillery captain, 
for seven years. 

It is not a particularly interesting city from 
some points of view, but it is a very ''livable" 
one, and for a student like Foch it had many 
advantages. The library is one of the best 
in provincial France and has many valuable 
manuscripts. There is also an archaeological 
museum of antiquities found in that vicinity, 
many of them relating to prehistoric warfare. 
Some good scientific collections are also treas- 
ured there. 

53 



54 FOCH THE MAN 

What is now known as the University of 
Rennes was styled merely the "college" in the 
days of Foch*s residence there. But it did sub- 
stantially the same work then as now, and 
among its faculty Foch undoubtedly found 
many who could give him able aid in his per- 
petual study of the past. 

Rennes especially cherishes the memory of 
Bertrand du Guesclin, the great constable of 
France under King Charles V and the victo- 
rious adversary of Edward III. This brilliant 
warrior, who drove the English, with their 
claims on French sovereignty, out of France, 
was a native of that vicinity. And we may 
be sure that whatever special opportunity 
Rennes afforded of studying documents relat- 
ing to his campaigns was fully improved by 
Captain Foch. 

In that time, also, Foch had ample occasion 
to know the Bretons, who are, in some respects, 
the least French of all French provincials — 
being much more Celtic still than Gallic, al- 
though it is a matter of some fifteen hundred 
years since their ancestors, driven out of 



FmST YEARS IN BRITTANY 55 

Britain by the Teutonic invasions, came over 
and settled "Little Britain," or Brittany. 

The Bretons maintained their independence 
of France for a thousand years, and only be- 
came united with it through the marriage of 
their last sovereign, Duchess Anne, with 
Charles VIII, in 1491 and — after his death — 
with his successor, Louis XII. 

And even to-day, after more than four cen- 
turies of political union, the people of Brittany 
are French in name and in spirit rather than 
in speech, customs, or temperament. Many of 
them do not speak or understand the French 
language. Few of them, outside of the cities, 
have conformed appreciably to French cus- 
toms. Quaint, sturdy, picturesque folk they 
are — simple, for the most part, superstitious, 
tenacious of the old, suspicious of the new, 
and governable only by those who understand 
them. 

Foch must have learned, in those seven 
years, not only to know the Bretons, but to 
like them and their rugged country very well. 
For he has had, these many years past, his 



56 FOCH THE MAN 

summer home near Morlaix on the north coast 
of Brittany. It was from there that he was 
summoned into the great war on July 26, 19 14. 

In 1885 Captain Foch was called to Paris 
and entered the Superior School of War. 

This institution, wherein he was destined 
to play in after years a part that profoundly 
affected the world's destiny, was founded only 
in 1878 as a training school for officers, con- 
nected with the military school which Louis 
XV established in 1751 to ''educate five hun- 
dred young gentlemen in all the sciences neces- 
sary and useful to an officer." 

One of the "young gentlemen" who profited 
by this instruction was the little Corsican 
whom Ferdinand Foch so ardently venerated. 

The building covers an area of twenty-six 
acres and faces the vast Champ-de-Mars, 
which was laid out about 1770 for the mili- 
tary school's use as a field for maneuvers. 

This field is eleven hundred yards long and 
just half that wide. It occupies all the ground 
between the school buildings and the river. 

Across the river is the height called the 
Trocadero, on which Napoleon hoped to build 



FIRST YEARS IN BRITTANY 57 

a great palace for the little King of Rome; 
but whereon, many years after he and his son 
had ceased to need mansions made by hands, 
the French republic built a magnificent palace 
for the French people. This vast building, 
with its majestic gardens, was the principal 
feature of the French national exhibition of 
1878, w^hich, like its predecessor of 1867 ^.nd 
its successors of 1889 and 1900, was held on 
the Champ-de-Mars. 

Facing the Trocadero Palace, on the Champ- 
de-Mars, is the Eiffel Tower (nearly a thou- 
sand feet high) which was erected for the 
exposition of 1889, and has served, since, then- 
unimaginable purposes during the stress and 
strain of war as a wireless station. The 
"Ferris" wheel put up for the exposition of 
1900 is close by. And a stone's throw from 
the military school are the Hotel des Invalides, 
Napoleon's tomb, and the magnificent Espla- 
nade des Invalides down which one looks 
straightway to the glinting Seine and over the 
superb Alexander III bridge toward the tree- 
embowered palaces of arts on the Champs- 
filysees. 



58 FOCH THE MAN 

On the other side of the Hotel des Invalides 
from that occupied by the military school and 
Champ-de-Mars is the principal diplomatic and 
departmental district of Paris, with many em- 
bassies (not ours, however, nor the British — 
which are across the river) and many adminis- 
trative offices of the French nation. 

Soldiers and government officials and for- 
eign diplomats dominate the quarter — and 
homes of the old French aristocracy. 

The Hotel des Invalides, founded by Louis 
XIV and designed to accommodate, as an old 
soldiers' home, some seven thousand veterans 
of his unending wars, has latterly served as 
headquarters for the military governor of 
Paris, and also — principally — as a war mu- 
seum. 

Here are housed collections of priceless 
worth and transcendent interest The museum 
of artillery contains ten thousand specimens 
of weapons and armor of all kinds, ancient and 
modern. The historical museum, across the 
court of honor, was — in the years when I spent 
many fascinating hours there — extraordinarily 



FIRST YEARS IN BRITTANY 59 

rich in personal souvenirs of scores of illus- 
trious personages. 

What it must be now, after the tragic years 
of a world war, and what it will become as a 
treasure house for the years to come, is beyond 
my imagination. 

It was into this enormously rich atmos- 
phere, pregnant with everything that conserves 
France's most glorioue military traditions, that 
Captain Ferdinand Foch was called in 1885 
for two years of intensive training and study. 



VII 
JOFFRE AND FOCH 

AFTER quitting the School of War in 
1887 (he graduated fourth in his 
class, as he had at Saumur; he was 
third at Fontainebleau), Ferdinand Foch was 
sent to Montpellier as a probationer for the 
position of staff officer. 

He remained at Montpellier for four years 
— first as a probationer and later as a staff 
officer in the Sixteenth Army Corps, whose 
headquarters are there. 

It is a coincidence — without special signifi- 
cance, but interesting — that Captain Joseph 
Joffre had spent several years at the School 
of Engineering in Montpellier ; he left there in 
1884, after the death of his young wife, to 
bury himself and his grief in Indo-China; so 
the two men did not meet in the southern city.* 

*I have found it interesting to compare the careers 
of Joffre and Foch from the time they were at school 
60 




Marshal Joffre General Foch 



JOFFRE AND FOCH 61 

Joffre returned from Indo-China in 1 888, 
while Foch was at Montpellier, and after some 
time in the military railway service, and a 
promotion in rank (he was captain for thirteen 
years), received an appointment as professor 
of fortifications at Fontainebleau. 

Some persons who claim to have known 
Joffre at Montpellier have manifested surprise 
at the greatness to which he attained thirty 
years later; he did not impress them as a man 
of destiny. That is quite as likely to be their 
fault as his. And also it is possible that Cap- 
tain Joseph Joffre had not then begun to de- 
velop in himself those qualities which made 
him ready for greatness when the opportunity 
came. 

If, however, any one has ever expressed sur- 
prise at Ferdinand Foch's attainment, I have 
not heard of it. He seems always to have 
impressed people with whom he came in con- 
tact as a man of tremendous energy, applica- 
tion, and thoroughness. 

together, and I daresay that others will like to know 
what steps forward he was taking who is not the sub- 
ject of these chapters but inseparably bound up with 
him in many events and forever linked with him in 
glory. 



62 FOCH THE MAN 

The opportunities for study at Montpellier 
are excellent, and the region is one of extraor- 
dinary richness for the lover of history. The 
splendor of the cities of Transalpine Gaul in 
this vicinity is attested by remains more nu- 
merous and in better preservation than Italy 
affords save in a very few places. And awe- 
inspiring evidences of medievalism's power 
flank one at every step and turn. Without 
doubt, Foch made the most of them. 

Needless to remark, the commander-in-chief 
of the allied armies has not confided to me 
what were his favorite excursions during these 
four years at Montpellier. But I am quite sure 
that Aigues-Mortes was one of them. And 
I like to think of him, as we know he looked 
then, pacing those battlements and pondering 
the warfare of those militant ages when this 
vast fortress in the wide salt marshes was one 
of the most formidable in the world. What 
fullness of detail there must have been in the 
mental pictures he was able to conjure of St. 
Louis embarking here on his two crusades! 
What particularity in his appreciation of those 
defenses ! 



JOFFRE AND FOCH 63 

The place is, to-day, the very epitome of 
desolation — ^much more so than if the fortifi- 
cations were not so perfectly preserved. For 
they look as if yesterday they might have been 
bristling with men-at-arms — whereas not in 
centuries has their melancholy majesty served 
any other purpose than that of raising reflec- 
tions in those to whom the past speaks through 
her monuments. 

From Montpellier, Ferdinand Foch returned 
to Paris, in February, 1891, as major on the 
general army staff. 

He and Joffre had now the same rank. 
Joffre became lieutenant colonel in 1894 and 
colonel in 1897; similar promotions came to 
Foch in 1896 and 1903. He was six years 
later than Joffre in attaining a colonelcy, and 
exactly that much later in becoming a general. 

Neither man had a quick rise but Foch's was 
(as measurable in grades and pay) specially 
slow. 

About the time that Major Joffre went to 
the Soudan, to superintend the building of a 
railway in the Sahara desert. Major Foch went 



64 FOCH THE MAN 

to Vincennes as commander of the mounted 
group of the Thirteenth Artillery. 

Vincennes is on the southeastern skirts of 
Paris, close by the confluence of the Seine and 
the Marne; about four miles or so from the 
Bastille, which was the city's southeastern 
gate for three hundred years or thereabouts, 
until the fortified inclosure on that side of the 
city was enlarged under Louis XIV. 

The fort of Vincennes was founded in the 
twelfth century to guard the approach to Paris 
from the Marne valley. And on account of 
its pleasant situation — close to good hunting 
and also to their capital — the castle of Vin- 
cennes was a favorite residence of many early 
French kings. 

It was there that St. Louis is said to have 
held his famous open-air court of justice, 
which he established so that his subjects might 
come direct to him with their troubles and he, 
besides settling them, might learn at first hand 
what reforms were needed. 

Five Kings of France died there (among 
them Charles VI? the mad king, and Charles 



JOFFRE AND FOCH 65 

IX, haunted by the horrors of the massacre 
on St. Bartholomew's eve), and one King of 
England, Harry Hotspur. King Charles V 
was born there. 

From the days of Louis XI the castle has 
been used as a state prison. Henry of Navarre 
was once a prisoner there, and so was the 
Grand Conde, and Diderot, and Mirabeau, and 
it was there that the young Due d'Enghien was 
shot by Napoleon's orders and to Napoleon's 
everlasting regret. 

The castle is now (and has been for many 
years) an arsenal and school of musketry ar- 
tillery, and other military services. Before its 
firing squad perish many traitors to France, 
whose last glimpse of the country they have 
betrayed is in the courtyard of this ancient 
castle. 

The vicinity is very lovely. The Bois de 
Vincennes, on the edge of which the castle 
stands, is scarcely inferior to the Bois de Bou- 
logne in charm. We used to go out there, not 
infrequently, for luncheon, which we ate in a 
rustic summerhouse close to the edge of the 



66 FOCH THE MAN 

lake, with many sociable ducks and swans 
bearing us company and clamoring for bits of 
bread. 

It would be hard to imagine an)^hing more 
idyllic, more sylvan, on the edge of a great city 
— anything more peaceful, restful, anywhere. 

Yet the whole locality was, even then, a 
veritable camp of Mars — forts, barracks, fields 
for maneuvers and for artillery practice, in- 
fantry butts, rifle ranges, school of explosives ; 
and what not. 

France knew her need of protection — and 
none of us can ever be sufficiently grateful that 
she did! 

But she did not obtrude her defensive meas- 
ures. She seldom made one conscious of her 
military affairs. 

In Germany, for many years before this war, 
remembrance of the army and reverence to the 
army was exacted of everyone almost at every 
breath. Forever and forever and forever you 
were being made to bow down before the God 
of War. 

In France, on the contrary, it was difficult 
to think about war — even in the very midst of 



JOFFRE AND FOCH 67 

a place like Vincennes — unless you were actu- 
ally engaged in organizing and preparing the 
country's defenses. 

After three years at Vincennes, Ferdinand 
Foch was recalled to the army staff in Paris. 
And on the 31st of October, 1895, ^^ was 
made associate professor of military history, 
strategy, and applied tactics, at the Superior 
School of War. 

He had then just entered upon his forty- 
fifth year; and the thoroughness of his train- 
ing was beginning to make itself felt at mili- 
tary headquarters. 



VIII 
THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR 

AFTER a year's service as associate pro- 
fessor of military history, strategy, 
and applied tactics at the Superior 
School of War in Paris, Ferdinand Foch was 
advanced to head professorship in those 
branches and at the same time he was made 
lieutenant colonel. This was in 1896. He was 
forty-five years old and had been for exactly 
a quarter of a century a student of the art of 
warfare. 

His old schoolfellow, Joseph Joffre, was 
then building fortifications in northern Mada- 
gascar ; and his army rank was the same as that 
of Foch. 

It was just twenty years after Foch entered 
upon his full-fledged professorship at the Su- 
perior School of War that Marshal Joffre, 
speaking at a dinner assembling the principal 



THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR 69 

leaders of the government and of the army, 
declared that without the Superior School of 
War the victory of the Marne would have been 
impossible. 

All the world knows this now, almost as 
well as Marshal Joffre knew it then. And all 
the world knows now as not even Marshal 
Joffre could have known then, how enormous 
■ — far, far beyond the check of barbarism at 
the first battle of the Marne — is our debt and 
that of all posterity to the Superior School of 
War and, chiefly, to Ferdinand Foch. 

It cannot have been prescience that called 
him there. It was just Providence, nothing 
less! 

For that was a time when men like Ferdi- 
nand Foch (whose whole heart was in the 
army, making it such that nothing like the 
downfall of 1870 could ever again happen to 
France), were laboring under extreme diffi- 
culties. The army was unpopular in France. 

This was due, partly to the disclosures of 
the Dreyfus case; partly to a wave of inter- 
nationalism and pacifism; partly to jealousy 
of the army among civil officials. 



70 FOCH THE MAN 

An unwarranted sense of security was also 
to blame. France had worked so hard to re- 
coup her fortunes after the disaster of 1870 
that her people — delighted with their ability as 
money makers, blinded by the glitter of great 
prosperity — grudged the expense of keeping up 
a large army, grudged the time that compul- 
sory military training took out of a young 
man's life. And this pre-occupation with suc- 
cess and the arts and pleasures of prosperous 
peace made them incline their ears to the apos- 
tles of "Brotherhood" and ^'Federation" and 
"Arbitration instead of Armament." 

Little by little legislation went against the 
army. The period of compulsory service was 
reduced from three years to two; that cut 
down the size of the army by one- third. The 
supreme command of the army was vested not 
in a general, but in a politician — the Minister 
of War. The generals in the highest com- 
mands not only had to yield precedence to the 
prefects of the provinces (like our governors 
of states), but were subject to removal if the 
prefects did not like their politics and the 



THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR 71 

Minister of War wished the support of the 
prefects. 

Even the superior war council of the nation 
might be politically made up, to pay the War 
Minister's scores rather than to protect the 
country. 

All this can happen to a people lulled by a 
false sense of security— even to a people which 
has had to defend itself against the savage 
rapacity of its neighbors across the Rhine for 
two thousand years! 

It was against these currents of popular 
opinion and of government opposition that 
Ferdinand Foch took up his work in the Su- 
perior School of War — that work which was 
to make possible the first victory of the Marne, 
to save England from invasion by holding 
Calais, and to do various other things vital 
to civilization, including the prodigious 
achievements of the days that have since fol- 
lowed. 

Foch foresaw that these things would have 
to be done and, with absolute consecration to 
his task, he set himself not only to train officers 



72 FOCH THE MAN 

for France when she should need them, but to 
inspire them with a unity of action which has 
saved the world. 

I have various word-pictures of him as he 
then appeared to, and impressed, his students. 

One is by a military writer who uses the 
pseudonym of *'Miles." 

"The officers who succeeded one another at 
the school of war between 1896 and 1901," 
he says, referring to the first term of Foch 
as instructor there, "will never forget the im- 
pressions made upon them by their professor 
of strategy and of general tactics. It was this 
course that was looked forward to with the 
keenest curiosity as the foundational instruc- 
tion given by the school. It enjoyed the pres- 
tige given it by the eminent authorities who 
had held it; and the eighty officers who came 
to the school at each promotion, intensely de- 
sirous of developing their skill and judgment, 
were always impatient to see and hear the man 
who was to instruct them in these branches. 

"Lieutenant Colonel Foch did not disappoint 
their expectations. Thin, elegant, of distin- 
guished bearing, he at once struck the beholder 



THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR 73 

with his expression — full of energy, of calm, 
of rectitude. 

''His forehead was high, his nose straight 
and prominent, his gray-blue eyes looked one 
full in the face. He spoke without gestures, 
with an air of authority and conviction; his 
voice serious, harsh, a little monotonous; am- 
plifying his phrases to press home in every 
possible way a rigorous reasoning; provoking 
discussion; always appealing to the logic of 
his hearers; sometimes difficult to follow, be- 
cause his discourse was so rich in ideas; but 
always holding attention by the penetration of 
his surveys as well as by his tone of sincerity. 

'The most profound and the most original 
of the professors at the school of war, which 
at that time counted in its teaching corps many 
very distinguished minds and brilliant lectur- 
ers: such Lieutenant Colonel Foch seemed to 
his students, all eager from the first to give 
themselves up to the enjoyment of his lessons 
and the acceptance of his inspiration." 

Colonel E. Requin of the French general 
staff, who has fought under Foch in some of 
the latter's greatest engagements, says: 



74 FOCH THE MAN 

"Foch has been for forty years the incarna- 
tion of the French military spirit." For forty 
years ! That means ever since he left the cav- 
alry school at Saumur and went, as captain 
of the Tenth regiment of artillery, to Rennes. 
"Through his teachings and his example," 
Colonel Requin goes on to say, in a recent 
number of the World's Work, "he was the 
moral director of the French general staff 
before becoming the supreme chief of the allied 
armies. Upon each one of us he has imprinted 
his strong mark. We owe to him in time of 
peace that unity of doctrine which was our 
strength. Since the war we owe to him the 
highest lessons of intellectual discipline and 
moral energy. 

"As a professor he applied the method which 
consists in taking as the base of all strategical 
and tactical instruction the study of history 
completed by the study of military history — 
that is to say, field operations, orders given, 
actions, results, and criticisms to be made and 
the instructions to be drawn from them. He 
also used concrete cases — that is to say, prob- 



THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR 75 

lems laid by the director on the map or on the 
actual ground. 

"By this intellectual training he accustomed 
the officers to solving all problems, not by giv- 
ing them ready-made solutions, but by making 
them find the logical solution to each individual 
case. 

"His mind was trained through so many 
years of study that no war situation could dis- 
turb him. In the most difficult ones, he 
quickly pointed out the goal to be reached and 
the means to employ, and each one of us felt 
that it must be right." 

But best of all the things said about Foch 
in that period of his life, I like this, by Charles 
Dawbarn, in the Fortnightly Review: 

"Such was" — in spite of many disappoint- 
ments — ''his fine confidence in life, that he 
communicated to others not his grievances, 
hut his secret satisfactions." 



IX 

THE GREAT TEACHER 

FOCH made the men who sat under him 
love their work for the work's sake 
and not for its rewards. He fired 
them with an ardor for military art which 
made them feel that in all the world there 
is nothing so fascinating, so worth while, as 
knowing how to defend one's country when 
she needs defense. 

He was able, in peace times when the mili- 
tary spirit was little applauded and much de- 
cried, to give his students an enthusiasm for 
"preparedness" which flamed as high and 
burned as pure as that which ordinarily is 
lighted only by a great national rush to arms 
to save the country from ravage. 

It was tremendously, incalculably important 
for France and for all of us that Ferdinand 

76 



THE GREAT TEACHER 77 

Foch was eager and able to impart this enthu- 
siasm for miHtary skill. 

But also it is immensely important, to- 
day behind the lines and in all days and all 
walks of life, that there be those who can 
kindle and keep alight the enthusiasm of their 
fellows; who can overlook the failure of their 
own ardor and faithfulness to win its fair re- 
ward, and convey to others only the alluring 
glow of their "secret satisfactions." 

In the five years, 1895-1901 (his work at the 
school was interrupted by politics in 1901), 
"many hundreds of officers," as Rene Puaux 
says, "the very elite of the general staffs of our 
army, followed his teaching and were imbued 
with it; and as they practically all, at the 
beginning of the war, occupied high positions 
of command, one may estimate as he can the 
profound and far reaching influence of this 
one grand spirit." 

Let us try to get some idea of the sort of 
thing that Foch taught those hundreds of 
French army officers, not only about war but 
about life. 

From all his study, he repeatedly declared, 



78 FOCH THE MAN 

one dominant conviction has evolved: Force 
that is not dominated by spirit is vain force. 

Victory, in his belief, goes to those who 
merit it by the greatest strength of will and 
intelligence. 

It was his endeavor, always, to develop in 
the hundreds of officers who were his students, 
that dual strength in which it seemed to him 
that victory could only lie: moral and intel- 
lectual ability to perceive what ought to be 
done, and intellectual and moral ability to do it. 

In his mind, it is impossible to be intelligent 
with the brain alone. The Germans do not 
comprehend this, and therein, to Ferdinand 
Foch, lies the key to all their failures. 

He believes that each of us must think with 
our soul's aid — that is to say, with our imagi- 
nation, our emotions, our aspiration — and em- 
ploy our intelligence to direct our feeling. 

And he asks this combination not from 
higher officers alone, but from all their men 
down to the humblest in the ranks. 

He believes in the invincibility of men fight- 
ing for a principle dearer to them than life — 
but he knows that ardor without leadership 



THE GREAT TEACHER 79 

means a lost cause; that men must know how 
to fight for their ideals, their principles; but 
that their officers are charged with the sacred 
responsibility of making the men's ardor and 
valor count. 

At the beginning of his celebrated course 
of lectures on tactics he always admonished 
his students thus : 

"You will be called on later to be the brain 
of an army. So I say to you to-day: Learn 
to think." 

By this he was far from meaning that offi- 
cers were to confine thinking to themselves, 
but that they were to teach themselves to think 
so that they might the better hand on intel- 
ligence and stimulate their men to obey not 
blindly but comprehendingly. 

It was a maxim of Napoleon's, of which 
Foch is very fond, that "as a general rule, the 
commander-in-chief ought only to indicate the 
direction, determine the ends to be attained; 
the means of getting there ought to be left to 
the free choice of the medimms of execution, 
without whom success is impossible." 

This leaves a great responsibility to officers. 



80 FOCH THE MAN 

but it is the secret of that flexibility which 
makes the French army so effective. 

For Foch carries his belief in individual 
judgment far beyond the officers commanding 
units ; he carries it to the privates in the ranks. 

An able officer, in Foch's opinion, is one 
who can take a general command to get his 
men such-and-such a place and accomplish 
such-and-such a thing, and so interpret that 
command to his men that each and every one 
of them will, while acting in strict obedience 
to orders, use the largest possible amount of 
personal intelligence in accomplishing the 
thing he was told to do. 

It is said that there was probably never 
before in history a battle fought in which 
every man was a general — so to speak — as at 
the battle of Chateau Thierry, in July, 1918. 
That is to say, there was probably never before 
a battle in which so many men comprehended 
as clearly as if they had been generals what 
it was all about, and acted as if they had been 
generals to attain their objectives. 

Doubtless there have been many such bat- 
tles since. 



THE GREAT TEACHER 81 

Foch has worked with a free hand to test 
the worth of his hfelong principles. And the 
hundreds of men he trained in those principles 
were ready to carry them out for him. 

No wonder his first injunction was: Learn 
to think! 

To him, the leadership of units is not a 
simple question of organization, of careful 
plans, of strategic and tactical intelligence, but 
a problem involving enormous adaptability. 

Battles are not won at headquarters, he con- 
tends; they are won in the field; and the con- 
ditions that may arise in the field cannot be 
foreseen or forestalled — they must be met 
when they present themselves. In large part 
they are made by the behavior of men in 
unexpected circumstances ; therefore, the more 
a commander knows about human nature and 
its spiritual depressions and exaltations, the 
better able he is to change his plans as new 
conditions arise. 

German power in war, Foch taught his stu- 
dents, lies in the great masses of their effective 
troops and their perfect organization for mov- 
ing men and supplies. German weakness is in 



82 FOCe THE ]\IAN 

the absolute autocracy of great headquarters, 
building its plans as an architect builds a house 
and unable to modify them if something hap- 
pens to make a change necesary. 

This he deduced from his study of their 
methods in previous wars, especially in that 
of 1870. 

And with this in mind he labored so that 
when Germany made her next assault upon 
France, France might be equipped with hun- 
dreds of officers cognizant of Germany's weak- 
ness and prepared to turn it to her defeat. 



!A! COLONEL AT FIFTY 

"TT was not," Napoleon wrote, "the Roman 
I legions which conquered Gaul, but 
Caesar. It was not the Carthaginian 
soldiers who made Rome tremble, but Hanni- 
bal. It was not the Macedonian phalanx 
which penetrated India, but Alexander. It 
was not the French army which reached the 
Weser and the Inn, but Turenne. It was not 
the Prussian soldiers who defended their 
country for seven years against the three most 
formidable powers in Europe; it was Fred- 
erick the Great." 

And already it has been suggested that his- 
torians will write of this war : "It was not the 
allied armies, struggling hopelessly for four 
years, that finally drove the Germans across 
the Rhine, but Ferdinand Foch." 

But I am sure that Foch would not wish 

83 



84 FOCH THE MAN 

this said of him in the same sense that Napo- 
leon said it of earlier generals. 

For Foch has a greater vision of generalship 
than was possible to any commander of long 
ago. 

His strategy is based upon a close study of 
theirs; for he says that though the forms of 
making war evolve, the directing principles do 
not change, and there is need for every officer 
to make analyses of Xenophon and Caesar and 
Hannibal as close as those he makes of Fred- 
erick and Napoleon. 

But his conception of military leadership is 
permeated with the ideals of democracy and 
justice for which he fights. 

One of his great lectures to student-officers 
was that in which he made them realize what, 
besides the rout of the Prussians, happened at 
Valmy in September, 1792. 

On his big military map of that region 
(it is in the obliterated St. Mihiel salient) 
Foch would show his students how the Prus- 
sians, Hessians and some Austrian troops, 
under the Duke of Brunswick, crossed the 
French frontier on August 19 and came swag- 



A COLONEL AT FIFTY 85 

gering toward Paris, braggartly announcing 
their intentions of ''celebrating" in Paris in 
September. 

Brunswick and his fellow generals were to 
banquet with the King of Prussia at the Tuile- 
ries. And the soldiers were bent upon the 
cafes of the Palais Royal. 

Foch showed his classes how Dumouriez, 
who had been training his raw troops of dis- 
organized France at Valenciennes, dashed 
with them into the Argonne to intercept 
Brunswick ; how this and that happened which 
I will not repeat here because it is merely tech- 
nical ; and then how the soldiers of the republic, 
rallied by the cry, ''The country is in dan- 
ger," and thrilled by "The Marseillaise" 
(written only five months before, but already 
it had changed the beat of nearly every heart 
in France), made such a stand that it not only 
halted Prussia and her allies, but so com- 
pletely broke their conquering spirit that with- 
out firing another shot they took themselves 
off beyond the Rhine. 

"We," Foch used to tell his students, "are 
the successors of the revolution and the em- 



86 FOCH THE MAN 

pire, the inheritors of the art, new-born upon 
the field of Valmy to astonish the old Europe, 
to surprise in particular the Duke of Bruns- 
wick, the pupil of Frederick the Great, and to 
tear from Goethe, before the immensity of a 
fresh horizon, this profound cry: 1 tell you, 
from this place and this day comes a new era 
in the history of the world !' " 

It is that new era which Foch typifies — that 
new era which his adversaries, deaf to Goethe's 
cry and blind to Goethe's vision, have not yet 
realized. 

It was "the old Europe" against which Fock 
fought — the old Europe which learned nothing 
at Valmy and has learned nothing since; the 
old Europe that fought as Frederick the Great 
fought and that had not yet seen the dawn of 
that new day which our nation and the French 
nation greeted with glad hails much more than 
a century ago. 

In 1792 Prussia measured her military skill 
and her masses of trained men against 
France's disorganization — and overlooked 
'The Marseillaise." 

In 19 14 she weighed her might against what 



A COLONEL AT FIFTY 87 

she knew of the might of France — and omitted 
to weigh certain spiritual differences which she 
could not comprehend, but which she felt at 
the first battle of the Marne, has been feeling 
ever since, and before which she had to retire, 
beaten but still blind. 

In 19 18 she estimated the probable force of 
those "raw recruits" whom we were sending 
overseas — and laughed. She based her calcu- 
lations on our lack of military tradition, our 
hastily trained officers, our "soft," ease-loving 
men uneducated in those ideals of blood and 
iron wherein she has reared her youth always. 
She overlooked that spiritual force which the 
"new era" develops and which made our men 
so responsive to the command of Foch at 
Chateau Thierry and later. 

"The immensity of a fresh horizon" where- 
on Goethe saw the new era dawning, is still 
veiled from the vision of his countrymen. But 
across its roseate reaches unending columns of 
marching men passed, under the leadership of 
Ferdinand Foch, to liberate the captives the 
blind brute has made and to strike down the 
strongholds of "old Europe" forever. 



88 FOCH THE MAN 

For nearly six years Foch taught such prin- 
ciples as these and others which I shall recall 
in connection with great events which they 
made possible later on. 

Then came the anti-clerical wave in French 
politics, and on its crest a new commandant 
to the School of War — a man elevated by the 
anti-clericals and eager to keep his elevation 
by pleasing those who put him there. 

Foch adheres devoutly to the religious prac- 
tices in which he was reared, and one of his 
brothers belongs to the Jesuit order. 

These conditions made his continuance at 
the school under its new head impossible. 
Whether he resigned because he realized this, 
or was superseded, I do not know. But he 
left his post and went as lieutenant colonel to 
the Twenty-ninth artillery, at Laon. 

He was there two years and undoubtedly 
made a thorough study of the country round 
Laon — which was for more than four years 
to be the key to the German tenure in that part 
of France. 

Ferdinand Foch, with his brilliant knowl- 



A COLONEL AT FIFTY 89 

edge and high ideals of soldiering, was now 
past fifty and not yet a colonel. 

Strong though his spirit was, sustained by 
faith in God and rewarded by those "secret 
satisfactions'' which come to the man who loves 
his work and is conscious of having given it 
his best, he must have had hours, days, when 
he drank deep of the cup of bitterness. There 
are, though, bitters that shrivel and bitters that 
tone and invigorate. Or perhaps they are the 
same and the difference is in us. 

At any rate, Foch was not poisoned at the 
cup of disappointment. 

And when the armies under his command 
encircled the great rock whereon Laon is 
perched high above the surrounding plains I 
hope Foch was with them — in memory of the 
days when he was "dumped" there, so to 
speak, far away from his sphere of influence 
at the School of War. 

In 1903 he was made colonel and sent to the 
Thirty-fifth artillery at Vannes, in Brittany. 

Only two years later he was called to 
Orleans as chief of staff of the Fifth army 
corps. 



90 FOCH THE MAN 

On June 20, 1907, he was made brigadier 
general and passed to the general staff of the 
French army at Paris. 

Soon afterwards, Georges Clemenceau be- 
came Minister of War, and was seeking a new 
head for the School of War. 

Everyone whose advice he sought said, un- 
hesitatingly : Foch. 

So the redoubtable old radical and anti- 
clerical summoned General Foch and said: 

"I offer you the command of the School of 
War." 

"I thank you,'* Foch replied, "but you are 
doubtless unaware that one of my brothers is 
a Jesuit." 

"I know it very well," was Clemenceau's 
answer. "But you make good ofificers, and that 
is the only thing which counts." 

Thus was foreshadowed, in these two great 
men, that spirit of "all for France" which, 
under the civil leadership of one and the mili- 
tary leadership of the other, was to save the 
country and the world. 

The interrupted courses of Foch were re- 



A COLONEL AT FIFTY 91 

sumed, and his influence extended throughout 
the whole school. 

After four years came "the white plume'* of 
general of a division and Foch, at 60, took 
command of the Thirteenth division at Chau- 
mont, just above the source of the Marne. 

On December 17, 19 12, he was placed at 
the head of the Eighth army corps, at Bourges. 

And on August 23, 191 3, he took command 
of the Twentieth corps at Nancy, 



XI 



FORTIFYING FRANCE WITH GREAT 
PRINCIPLES 

SO much has been said about France's 
unreadiness for the war that it is easy 
for those who do not know what the 
real situation was to suppose that the French 
were something akin to fools. For twenty 
centuries the Germans had been swarming 
over the Rhine in preying, ravaging hordes, 
and France had been beating them back to save 
her national life. That they would swarm 
again, more insolent and more rapacious than 
ever after their triumph of 1870, was not to 
be doubted. Everyone in France who had the 
slightest knowledge of the spirit that has ani- 
mated the Hohenzollern empire knew its envy 
of France, its cupidity of France's wealth, its 
hatred of France's attractions for all the 
world. Everyone who came in contact 
with the Germans felt the bullet-headed bel- 



GREAT PRINCIPLES 93 

ligerence of their attitude which they were 
never at any pains to conceal. 

The military men of France knew that Ger- 
many had for years been preparing for aggres- 
sion on a large scale. They knew that she 
would strike when she felt that she was 
readiest and her opponents of the Triple En- 
tente were least ready. 

The state of mind of the civilians — busy, 
prosperous, peace-loving, concerned with con- 
versational warfare about a multitude of petty 
internal affairs — is difficult to describe. But I 
think it may not be impertinent to say of it 
that it was something like the state of mind 
of a congregation, well fed, comfortable, con- 
scious of many pleasant virtues and few cor- 
roding sins, before whom a preacher holds up 
the last judgment. None of them hopes to 
escape it, none of them can tell at what mo- 
ment he may be called to his account, none of 
them would wish to go in just his present state, 
and yet none of them does anything when he 
leaves church to put himself more definitely in 
readiness for that great decision which is to 
determine where he shall spend eternity. 



94 FOCH THE MAN 

In 191 1 it seemed for a brief while that 
the irruption from the east was at hand. But 
Germany did not feel quite ready; she 
"dickered"; and things went on seemingly as 
before. 

France seemed to forget. But she was not 
so completely abandoned to hopefulness as 
was England — England, who turned her deaf- 
est ear to Lord Roberts' impassioned pleas for 
preparedness. 

France has an institution called the Superior 
War Council. It is the supreme organ of mili- 
tary authority and the center of national de- 
fense; it consists of eleven members sup- 
posed to be the ablest commanding generals 
in the nation. The president of this council 
is the Minister of War; the vice president 
is known as the generalissimo of the French 
army. 

In 1 910 General Joseph Joffre became a 
member of the Superior War Council, and in 
191 1 he became generalissimo. 

It was because the Council felt the immi- 
nence of war with Germany that General Pau 
— ^to whom the vice presidency should have 



GREAT PRINCIPLES 95 

gone by right of his priority and also of his 
eminent fitness — patriotically waived the honor, 
because in two years he would be sixty-five 
and would have to retire; he felt that the 
defense of the country needed a younger man 
who could remain more years in service. So 
Joffre was chosen and almost immediately he 
began to justify the choice. 

Joffre and his associates of the council not 
only foresaw the war, but they quite clearly 
previsioned its extent and something of its 
character. In 19 12 Joffre declared "the fight- 
ing front will extend from four hundred to 
five hundred miles." He talked little, but he 
worked prodigiously ; and always his insistence 
was : 'We must be prepared !" 

*With whole nations," he said, "engaged in 
a mortal combat, disaster is certain for those 
who in time of peace failed to prepare for 
war." And "To be ready means, to-day, to 
have mustered in advance all the resources of 
the country, all the intelligence of its citizens, 
all their moral energy, for the purpose of at- 
taining this one aim — victory. Getting ready 
is a duty that devolves not only upon the army, 



96 FOCH THE MAN 

but upon all public officials, upon all organiza- 
tions, upon all societies, upon all families, upon 
all citizens," 

This complete readiness was beyond his 
power to effect. But in his province — the 
army — ^he achieved marvels that were almost 
miracles. 

It was France's good fortune (and that of 
her allies) that in all he undertook for the 
purification and strengthening of the army 
Joffre had, from January, 19 12, the complete 
co-operation of the Minister of War, M. Mil- 
lerand. Together, these two men, brilliantly 
supported by some of Joffre's colleagues in the 
Superior Council — notably Pau and Castelnau 
— achieved results that have been pronounced 
"unparalleled in the history of the Third Re- 
public." They freed the army from the worst 
effects of political influence, made it once more 
a popular institution, and organized it into an 
effectiveness which needs, now, no comment. 

When Foch was put in command of the 
Twentieth army corps at Nancy it was in the 
expectation that Nancy would sustain the first 
shock of the German invasion when it came. 



GREAT PRINCIPLES 97 

The opinion prevailed that Nancy could not be 
held. Whether Joffre was of this opinion or 
not, I do not know. If he was, he probably 
felt that Foch would give it up only after 
harder fighting than any other general. But 
Foch believed that Nancy could be defended, 
and so did his immediate superior, the gallant 
General Castelnau, in command of the Second 
Army of Lorraine. 

For nearly a year following upon his ap- 
pointment to Nancy, Foch labored mightily to 
strengthen Nancy against the attack which was 
impending. He seems never to have doubted 
that Germany would make her first aggression 
there, only seventeen miles from her own bor- 
der, and with Metz and Strassburg to back the 
invading army. 

But that there were other opinions, even at 
Nancy, I happen to know. For, one day while 
the war was still new, I chanced in rooting 
in an old bookstall in Paris, to find a book 
which was written by an officer of the Twen- 
tieth Corps, in 191 1.* 

* The reason I cannot give his name, nor quote directly 
from his book, is that a fellow traveler borrowed the book 
from me and I have never seen it since. 



98 FOCH THE MAN 

The officer was, if I mistake not, of the 
artillery, and he wrote this "forecast" to enter- 
tain the members of his mess or battery. 

He predicted with amazing accuracy the suc- 
cessive events which happened nearly three 
years later, only he "guessed" the order for 
mobilization in France to fall on August 14, 
instead of August i ; and all his subsequent 
dates were just about two weeks later than the 
actualities. But he "foresaw" the invasion of 
Belgium, the resistance at Liege and Namur, 
the fall of Brussels, the invasion of France by 
her northeastern portals. Almost — at the time 
I read this book — it might have served as his- 
tory instead of prophecy. I would that I had 
it now ! But I clearly remember that it located 
the final battle of the war in Westphalia, de- 
scribing the location exactly. And that it said 
the Emperor would perish in that downfall of 
his empire. And it cited two prophecies cur- 
rent in Germany — the long-standing one to the 
effect that Germany's greatest disaster would 
come to her under an Emperor with a withered 
arm, and one made in Strassburg in 1870, de- 



GREAT PRINCIPLES 99 

daring that the new empire would dissolve 
under its third Emperor. 

The book was published in January, 19 12, if 
I remember rightly, and was almost immedi- 
ately translated into German. And I was told 
that one hundred thousand copies were 
sold in Germany in a very short time, and it 
was made the subject of editorials in nearly 
every prominent German paper. 

Probably Foch read it. He may even have 
discussed it with the author. But he held to 
the belief that when the attack came it would 
come through Nancy. 

He was not, however, expecting it when it 
came. 



XII 

ON THE EVE OF WAR 

IN the first days of July, 19 14, divisional 
maneuvers were held as usual in Lor- 
raine. Castelnau and Foch reviewed the 
troops, known throughout the army as ''the 
division of iron" 

A young captain, recently assigned from the 
School of War to a regiment of Hussars form- 
ing part of the Twentieth army corps, wrote 
to his parents on July 5 an account of the 
maneuvers in which he had just taken part. He 
said that ''the presence of these two eminent 
men gave a great interest" to the events he 
described. And the impression made upon him 
by Foch is so remarkable that his letter is likely 
to become one of the small classics of the war 
— endlessly reproduced whenever the story of 
Foch is told. 

100 



ON THE EVE OF WAR 101 

''General Foch," he reminds his parents, "is 
a former commander of the School of War, 
where he played, on account of his great fit- 
ness, a very remarkable role. 

"He is a man still young [he was almost 
63!], slender and supple, and rather frail; his 
powerful head seems like a flower too heavy 
for a stem too slight. 

"What first strikes one about him is his 
clear gaze, penetrating, intellectual, but above 
all and in spite of his tremendous energy, 
luminous. This light in his eyes spiritualizes a 
countenance which otherwise would be brutal, 
with its big mustache bristling above a very 
prominent, dominant jaw. 

"When he speaks, pointing lessons from the 
maneuver, he becomes animated to the extent 
of impassionedness, but never expressing him- 
self otherwise than with simplicity and purity. 

"His speech is sober, direct ; he affirms prin- 
ciples, condemns faults, appeals to our ener- 
gies in a brief but comprehensive style. 

"He is a priest, who judges, condemns, and 
instructs in the name of the faith which illu- 
mines him and to which he has consecrated 



102 FOCH THE MAN 

all the powers of his mind and his heart. 
General Foch is a prophet whom his God trans- 
ports." 

The young officer who wrote thus to his 
parents was Captain Andre Dubarle; and he 
later laid down his life for his country on the 
field of honor commanded by General Foch. 

The letter seems to me as treasurable for 
what it conveys to us of the sort of young man 
Foch found among his officers and soldiers 
(there were many such!) as for what it tells 
us of the impression Foch created even in those 
days before men's souls were set on fire with 
fervor for France. 

On July 1 8 General Foch asked and obtained 
a leave of absence for fifteen days, so that he 
might join the family group gathered at his 
home near Morlaix in Brittany. His two sons- 
in-law, Captain Fournier and Captain Becourt, 
also obtained leave. The former was attached 
to the general army staff at Paris, and was 
granted seventeen days. The latter was in 
command of a company of the Twenty-sixth 
battalion of Foot Chasseurs at Pont-a-Mous- 
son. He was given twenty-five days* leave. 



ON THE EVE OF WAR 103 

The wives and children of both were at Mor- 
laix with Madame Foch. 

So little expectation of immediate war had 
France on July i8 that she granted a fort- 
night's absence to the commander of those 
troops which were expected to bear the first 
shock of German aggression when it came. 

But I happen to know of a French family 
reunion held at Nancy on July 14 and the days 
following, which was incomplete. One of the 
women of this family was married to a Ger- 
man official at Metz whose job it was to be 
caretaker for three thousand locomotives be- 
longing to the imperial government and kept 
at Metz for "emergencies." On July 12 (as it 
afterwards transpired) he was ordered to have 
fires lighted and steam got up in those three 
thousand engines, and to keep them, night and 
day, ready for use at a moment's notice. 

Those smoking iron horses in Metz are a 
small sample of what was going on all over 
Germany while France's frontier-defenders 
were being given permission to visit Brittany. 

But for that matter German war-prepara- 
tions were going on much nearer to Nancy 



104 FOCH THE MAN 

than in Metz, while Foch was playing with his 
grandchildren at Morlaix. 

Beginning about July 21 and ending about 
the 25th, twelve thousand Germans left Nancy 
for "points east," and six thousand others left 
the remainder of French Lorraine. 

The pretexts they gave were various — ^vaca- 
tions, urgent business matters, "cures" at Ger- 
man watering places. They all knew, when 
they left, that Germany was mobilizing for 
attack upon France. They had known it for 
some time before they left. 

Since the beginning of July they had been 
working in Nancy to aid the German attack. 
They had visited the principal buildings, 
public and private, and especially the highest 
ones, with plans for the installation of wire- 
less at the modest price of $34. "It is so in- 
teresting," they said, "to get the exact time, 
every day, from the Eiffel Tower!" 

They had also some amazingly inexpensive 
contrivances for heating houses, or regulating 
the heating already installed, or for home re- 
frigeration — things which took them into cel- 
lars in Nancy — ^and before they left to join 



ON THE EVE OF WAR 105 

their regiments they were exceedingly busy 
demonstrating those things. 

They were all gone when General Foch was 
recalled, on July 26. 

On July 30 German under-officers crossed 
the frontier. 

On August 3 Uhlans and infantrymen on 
motorcycles were shooting and pillaging on the 
French side of the border, although it was not 
until 6:45 P.M. that day that Germany de- 
clared war on France. 

That which France had been unable to sup- 
pose even Germany capable ol, happened : The 
treaty with Belgium became a scrap of paper 
and the main attack upon France was made 
by way of the north. 

But the expectation that Nancy would be 
one of the first objectives of the Hun-rampant 
was not without fulfillment. For the hordes 
advanced in five armies; and the fifth, the 
German left wing under Crown Prince Rup- 
precht of Bavaria, was ordered to swarm into 
France south of that of the Imperial Crown 
Prince, spread itself across country behind the 
French armies facing northward, join with 



106 FOCH THE ]\L\N 

Von Kluck's right wing somewhere west of 
Paris, and "bag" the French — armies, capital 
and all — **on or about" September i. 

It was all perfectly practicable — on paper. 
The only difficulty was tliat tliere were so 
many tilings tlie Gennan staff had omitted 
from its careful calculations — omitted, per- 
force, because it had never guessed their exist- 
ence. And that spoiled tlieir reckoning. 

Foch had, for years, been teaching that fight- 
ing demands supreme flexibility, adaptabilit}^ 
tliat war is full of surprises whicli must be 
met as they arise; tliat morale, the spiritual 
force of an army, is subject to fluctuations 
caused by dozens of conditions which cannot 
be foreseen and must be overcome. The 
phrase oftenest on his lips was: "What have 
we to do here ?" For, as he conceived warfare, 
officers and even privates must constantly be 
asking themselves that. One plan goes awry. 
Very well ! we'll find a better. 

But Foch had not trained the German gen- 
eral staff. They made war otherwise. And 
well he knew it ! Well he knew what happened 



ON THE EVE OF WAE la? 

to them when their "blue prints" would not fit 
unexpected conditions. 

He knew that they expected to take Nancy 
easily, that they were looking for some effort 
to defend it, but not for a French attack. 

They did not know his maxim: *'The best 
means of defense is to attack." 

He attacked. His Twentieth corps fought 
its way through the center of the Bavarian 
army, into German Lorraine. Then something 
happened. Just what it was is not clear — but 
doubtless wnll be some day. The offensive had 
to be abandoned and the French troops had 
to withdraw from German soil to defend their 
own. 

How bitter was the disappointment to Foch 
we may guess but shall never know. But 
remaking plans in his genius. 

"What have we to do here ?" he asked him- 
self. 

Then, "in the twinkling of an eye," says one 
military historian, "General Foch found the 
solution to the defense problem wherewith he 
was so suddenly confronted when his offensive 
failed of support." 



XIII 
THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE 

WHAT is known as the battle of Lor- 
raine began at the declaration of 
war and lasted till August 26— 
though the major part of it was fought in the 
last six of those days. 

I shall not go into details about it here, ex- 
cept to recall that it was in this fighting that 
General Castelnau lost his oldest son, stricken 
almost at the father's side. 

A German military telegram Intercepted on 
August 27 said: 

"On no account make known to our armies 
of the west [that is to say, the right wing, in 
Belgium] the checks sustained by our armies 
of the east [the left wing, in Lorraine]." 

So much depended on those plans which 
Castelnau and Dubail and Foch — and very par- 
ticularly Foch! — had frustrated. 

108 



THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE 109 

Joffre realized what had been achieved. And 
on August 2^] he issued the following "order 
of the day'' : 

"The First and Second armies are at this 
moment giving an example of tenacity and of 
courage which the commander-in-chief is 
happy to bring to the knowledge of the troops 
under his orders. 

"These two armies undertook a general of- 
fensive and met with brilliant success until 
they hurled themselves at a barrier fortified 
and defended by very superior forces. 

"After a retreat in perfect order, the two 
armies resumed the offensive and, combining 
their efforts, retook a great part of the terri- 
tory they had given up. 

"The enemy bent before them and his recoil 
enabled us to establish undeniably the very 
serious losses he had suffered. 

"These armies have fought for fourteen 
days without a moment's respite, and with an 
unshakable confidence in victory as the reward 
of their tenacity. 

"The general-in-chief knows that the other 



no FOCH THE MAN 

armies will be moved to follow the example 
of the First and Second armies." 

Now, where were those other armies ? And 
what were they doing? 

France had then eight armies in the field, 
and was soon to have a ninth — commanded by- 
General Foch. 

There was the First army, under General 
Dubail; the Second, under General Castelnau; 
the Third, under General Sarrail; the Fourth, 
under General Langle de Gary; the Fifth, 
under General Franchet d'Esperey; the Sixth, 
under General Manoury; the Seventh and 
Eighth armies are not mentioned in the Battle 
of the Marne, and I have not been able to find 
out where they were in service. 

The First and Second armies, fighting in 
Lorraine, we know about. They developed, in 
that battle, more than one great commander 
of whose abilities Joff re hastened to avail him- 
self. On the day he issued that order com- 
mending the First and Second armies, the gen- 
eralissimo called Manoury from the Lorraine 
front, where he had shown conspicuous lead- 
ership, and put him in command of the newly- 



THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE 111 

created Sixth army, which was to play the 
leading part in routing Von Kluck. And on 
the next day (August 28) Joffre called Foch 
from Lorraine to head the new Ninth army, 
which was to hold the center at the Battle of 
the Mame and deal the smashing, decisive 
blow. 

In two days, while his troops were retreat- 
ing before an apparently irresistible force, 
Joffre created two new armies, put at the head 
of each a man of m.agnificent leadership, and 
intrusted to those two armies and their leaders 
the most vital positions in the great battle he 
was planning. 

The German soldiers facing Joffre were act- 
ing on general orders printed for them eight 
years before, and under specific orders which 
had been worked out by their high command 
with the particularity of machine specifications. 
And all their presumptions were based on the 
French doing what Teutons would do in the 
same circumstances. Their extra-suspender- 
button efficiency and preparedness were pitted 
against the flexible genius of a man who could 
assemble his two "sliock" armies in two days 



112 FOCH THE MAN 

and put them under the command of men 
picked not from the top of his list of available 
commanders, but practically from the bottom. 

The Third, Fourth and Fifth armies of 
Joffre were those which had sustained the ter- 
rific onslaught in the north and had been fight- 
ing in retreat, practically since the beginning. 

On August 25 Joffre declared: "We have 
escaped envelopment" — thanks largely to the 
action in Lorraine, holding back the Bavarians 
— and, clearly seeing that he could not hope 
for favorable results from a great battle 
fought in the north, he gave the order for re- 
treat which meant the abandonment of north- 
eastern France to the Hunnish hordes. 

What anguish that order caused him we 
shall never know. He realized to the full what 
the people of that great, prosperous part of 
France would have to suffer. He was aware 
what the loss of those resources would mean 
to the French, and also what their gain 
would mean to the Germans. He under- 
stood the effect of retreat upon the mo- 
rale of his men. And he must have been aware 
of the panic his order would create throughout 



THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE 113 

the yet-uninvaded parts of France where no 
one could know at what point the invasion 
would be checked. He knew that the nation's 
faith in him would be severely shaken, and 
that even his army's faith in him would be put 
to a supreme test. 

But when a man trains himself to be a com- 
mander of men, he trains himself to go 
through, heroically and at any cost, what he 
believes must be done. To sacrifice one's self 
comes comparatively easy — given compelling 
circumstances and an obedient soul. But to 
sacrifice others never becomes easy to a man 
who respects the rights of others. And we 
shall never begin to comprehend men like 
Joffre and Foch until we shake ourselves free 
from any notion we may have that military 
expediency makes it easy for them to order 
great mental and physical suffering. 

General Foch detached himself, on August 
29, from his beloved Twentieth corps and be- 
took himself to the little village of Machault, 
about twenty miles northeast of Chalons-sur- 
Marne, where he found assembled for his 
command an army made up of units from 



114 FOCH THE MAN 

other armies. They were all more or less 
strange to one another and to him. 

There was the Ninth army corps, from 
Tours, made up of Angevins (men such as 
Foch had learned to know when he was at 
Saumur) and Vendeans (the Bretons' south 
neighbors). Some of these men had been 
fighting without respite for nine days as they 
fell back, with the Fourth army, from the Bel- 
gian border. With them, since August 22, had 
been the remarkable Moroccan division under 
General Humbert. 

Then there was the Eleventh corps of Bre- 
tons and Vendeans, which had been through 
the same terrible retreat. 

And — not to enumerate too far — there was 
that Forty-second division of infantry which 
was destined to play one of the most dramatic, 
thrilling, forever-memorable parts in all war- 
fare. It had been in the Ardennes, and had 
fallen back, fighting fiercely as it came. 

To help him command these weary men 
whose hearts were heavy with forebodings for 
France, Foch had, as he himself has said, "a 
general staff of five or six officers, gathered 



THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE 115 

in haste to start with, little or no working 
material, our note books and a few maps." 

"Those who lived through these tragic hours 
near him," says Rene Puaux, ''recall the chief 
questioning the liaison officers who did not 
know exactly where the different units were, 
punctuating his questions with: 'You don't 
know ? Very well, then go and find out !' ; put- 
ting together in his head the mosaic of which 
there were still so many pieces missing; grad- 
ually visioning a plan for bringing them 
together; calculating his effectives; estimating 
approximately his reserves of ammunition ; dis- 
covering his bases of food supply." 

And through all this stress he had the per- 
sonal anguish of being unable to get word of 
his only son, Germain Foch, or of his son-in- 
law, Captain Becourt, both of whom had been 
fighting on the Belgian front. 

*Tt was not, however," M. Puaux says, "the 
time for personal emotions. The father ef- 
faced himself before the soldier. There was 
nothing to be thought of save the country." 

Thus we see Ferdinand Foch, on the eve 
of the first Battle of the Marne. 



XIV 
THE FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE 

IT was Saturday, August 29, 19 14, when 
General Foch went to Machault to take 
command of the various units he was to 
weld into the Ninth army. 

On the Tuesday following (September i)' 
Joffre was quartered with his general staff at 
the little old town of Bar-sur-Aube, fifty miles 
south of Chalons, and he had then determined 
the limits to which he would permit the retreat 
of his armies. 

If a stand could be taken and an offensive 
launched further north than the Aube River, 
it should be done; but in no event would the 
withdrawal go beyond the Seine, the Aube and 
the region north of Bar-le-Duc. 

He then placed his armies in the field in 
the relation in which he deemed they would 
be most effective: the First army, under Gen- 

116 



FIRST VICTORY AT THE IVIARNE 117 

eral Dubail, was in the Vosges, and the Sec- 
ond army, under General Castelnau, was round 
about Nancy; the Third army, under General 
Sarrail, east and south of the Argonne in a 
kind of "elbow/* joining the Fourth army, 
under General de Langle de Gary; then the 
Ninth army, under General Foch; then the 
Fifth army, under General Franchet d'Espe- 
rey ; then the little British army of three corps, 
under General Sir John French; and then the 
new Sixth army, under General Manoury. 

So Foch, on the third day of organizing his 
new command, received orders — at once ter- 
rible and immensely flattering — that he was to 
occupy the center of Joffre's battle line and 
to sustain the onslaught of Von Buelow and 
the famous Prussian Guards. 

In the morning of Saturday, September 5, 
all commanders received from Joffre the now 
historic message : 

"The moment has come for the army to 
advance at all costs and allow itself to be slain 
where it stands rather than give way/' 

The men to whom this order was relayed 
by their commanders had, five-sixths of them, 



118 FOCH THE MAN 

been ceaselessly engaged, without one single 
day's rest of any kind and much of the time 
without night rest either, for fourteen days, 
fighting as they fell back, and falling back as 
they fought; the skin was all worn from the 
soles of their feet, and what shoes they had 
left were stuck to their feet with blood. 

*They had marched under a torrid sky," 
says Louis Madelin, "on scorching roads, 
parched and suffocated with dust. In reality 
they moved with their hearts rather than with 
their legs. According to Pierre Lasserre's 
happy expression, 'Our bodies had beaten a re- 
treat, but not our hearts.' . . . But when, 
worn out with fatigue, faces black with pow- 
der, blinded by the chalk of Champagne, almost 
dying, they learned Joffre's order announcing 
the offensive, then the faces of our troops from 
Paris to Verdun beamed with joy. They 
fought with tired limbs, and yet no army ever 
showed such strength, for their hearts were 
filled with faith and hope." 

At daybreak on Sunday, the 6th, Foch 
pitched his headquarters in a modern chateau 
near the little village of Pleurs, which you 



FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE 119 

probably will not find on any map except a mili- 
tary one, but it is some six miles southeast of 
Sezanne. And the front assigned to Foch 
ran from Sezanne to the Camp de Mailly, 
twenty-five miles east by a little south. The 
Marne was twenty-five miles to north of 
him. Between him and its south bank were 
many towns and villages; the clay pocket (ten 
miles long) called the Marshes of St. Gond, 
but far from marshy in that parching heat; 
and north of that the forest of Epernay. His 
vanguards were north of the marshes. But 
as that Sunday wore on, the Prussian Guards 
drove Foch's Angevins and Vendeans of the 
Ninth Corps back and occupied the marshes. 
The Bretons on the east of Foch's line were 
obliged to dislodge, and the Moroccans and 
Forty-second Division had to yield on Foch's 
left. 

Thus, at nightfall of the first day's fighting, 
Foch's new army had given ground practically 
everywhere. 

The next day the German attack became 
fiercer, and it seemed that more ground must 
be yielded. 



120 FOCH THE MAN 

That was the day when Foch made his 
memorable deduction: "They are trying to 
throw us back with such fury I am sure that 
means things are going badly for them else- 
where and they are seeking compensation." 

He was right! Von Kluck was retiring in 
a northeasterly direction under Manoury's 
blows; and even Von Buelow (whom Foch 
faced) was withdrawing parts of his troops 
from the line at Foch's left. 

But the attempt to break through the center 
Foch held, waxed fiercer as the Germans real- 
ized the strength opposing them on their right. 

And on Tuesday, the 8th, Foch was unable 
to hold — save at certain points — and had to 
move his headquarters eleven miles south, to 
Plancy. 

He had now reached the Aube, beyond which 
Joffre had decreed that he must not retire. 
On its north bank his gallant army must, if it 
could not do otherwise, ''allow itself to be 
slain where it stands rather than give way." 

On that evening he sent Major Requin to 
the Forty-second Division V\^ith orders for the 
morrow. The most incredible orders! 



FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE 121 

The enemy had found his point of least 
resistance — on his right wing. He ought to 
strengthen that wing, but he could not. All 
the reserves were engaged — and the enemy 
knew it as well as he did. And it is a fixed 
principle of war not to withdraw active troops 
from one part of the line to strengthen 
another. 

Only one part of his army had had any 
success that day: Toward evening the Forty- 
second Division and the Moroccans had made 
an irresistible lunge forward and driven the 
enemy to the north edge of the marshes. 

They were weary — those splendid troops — 
but they were exalted ; they had advanced ! 

Foch believes in the power of the spirit. 
He appealed to the Forty-second to do an 
extraordinary thing — to march, weary as it 
was, from left to right of his long line and 
brace the weak spot. And to cover up the 
gap their withdrawal would make he asked 
General Franchet d'Esperey to stretch out the 
front covered by his right wing and adjoining 
Foch's left. 

In a letter to me, Lieutenant Colonel (then 



122 FOCH THE MAN 

Major) Requin gives some graphic bits 
descriptive of that historic errand. He was 
a sort of liaison officer between General Gros- 
setti, commanding the Forty-second Division, 
and the latter's chief, General Foch, his special 
duty being to carry General Foch's orders to 
General Grossetti and to keep the army chief 
informed, each evening, how his commands 
were being carried out. 

"It was 10 P.M.," he writes, "when I roused 
General Grossetti from his sleep in the straw, 
in the miserable little shell-riddled farm of 
Chapton. 

"The order astonished him; but like a 
disciplined leader, he started to execute it with 
all the energy of which this legendary soldier 
was capable." 

The Forty-second came! While they were 
marching to the rescue the Prussian Guard in 
a colossal effort smashed through Foch's right. 
They were wild with joy. The French line 
was pierced. They at once began celebrating, 
at La Fere-Champenoise. 

When this was announced to Foch he tele- 
graphed to general headquarters: 



FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE 123 

"My center gives way, my right recedes; 
the situation is excellent. I shall attack." ' 

For this, we must remember, is the man who 
says: "A battle won is a battle in which one 
is not able to believe one's self vanquished." 

He gave the order to attack. Everything 
that he cared about in this world was at stake. 
This desperate maneuver would save it all — 
or it would not. He gave the order to attack 
— ^and then he went for a walk on the out- 
skirts of the little village of Plancy. His com- 
panion was one of his staff officers, Lieutenant 
Ferasson of the artillery; and as they walked 
they discussed metallurgy and economics. 

There could be nothing more typically 
French or more diametrically opposed to the 
conceptions of French character which pre- 
vailed in other countries before this war. And 
I hope that if Lieutenant Ferasson survives, he 
will accurately designate (if he can) exactly 
where Foch walked on that Wednesday after- 
noon, September 9, when, his center having 
given way, his right wing receded, he pro- 
nounced the "situation excellent," gave the 



124 FOCH THE MAN 

order for attack, and went out to discuss 
metallurgy. 

Toward six o'clock on that evening the Ger- 
mans, celebrating their certain victory, saw 
themselves confronted by a "new" French 
army pouring into the gap they had thought 
their road to Paris. 

The Forty-second Division (more than half 
dead of fatigue, but their eyes, blazing with 
such immensity and intensity of purpose it has 
been said the Germans fled, as before spirits, 
when they saw these men) had not only 
blocked the roundabout road to Paris; they 
had broken the morale of Von Buelow's crack 
troops. Without this brilliant maneuver and 
superb execution the successes of all the other 
armies must have gone for naught. 

"To be victorious," said Napoleon, "it is 
necessary only to be stronger than your enemy 
at a given point and at a given moment." 

Foch^s preferred way to take advantage of 
that given point and moment is with reserves, 
which he called the reservoirs of force. "The 
art of war consists in having them when the 
enemy has none." 



FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE 125 

But as there were no reserves available at 
that first Battle of the Marne, he exempHfied 
his other principle that conditions must be met 
as they arise. 

"I still seem/* says Rene Puaux, "to hear 
General Foch telling us, one evening after din- 
ner at Cassel several months later, about that 
maneuver of September 9. 

"He had put matches on the tablecloth" — 
some red matches which Colonel Requin 
treasures as a souvenir — "and he illustrated 
with them the disposition of the troops en- 
gaged. For the Forty-second Division he had 
only half a match, which he moved here and 
there with his quick, deft fingers as he talked. 

"The match representing the Twelfth Ger- 
man Corps (which with the Prussian Guard 
was cutting the gap in Foch's weak spot) was 
about to make a half-turn which would bring 
it in the rear of the French armies. 

"The general, laying down the half-match 
that was the Forty-second Division, made an 
eloquent gesture with his hand, indicating the 
move that the Forty-second made. 

" Tt might succeed,' he said, laconically, 'or 



126 FOCH THE MAN 

it might fail. It succeeded. Those men were 
exhausted ; they won, nevertheless.' " 

At nine o'clock the next morning (Septem- 
ber lo) the Forty-second entered La Fere- 
Champenoise, where they found officers of the 
Prussian Guard lying, dead drunk, on the 
floors in the cantonments, surroimded by innu- 
merable bottles of stolen champagne where- 
with they had been celebrating their victory. 

Two days later Foch was at Chalons, to 
direct in person the crossing of the Marne by 
his army in pursuit of the fleeing enemy, 

"The cavalry, the artillery, the unending 
lines of supply wagons," says Colonel Requin, 
"the infantry in two columns on either side of 
the road; all this in close formation descend- 
ing like a torrent to resume its place of battle 
above the passage on the other side of the 
river ; was an unforgettable sight and one that 
gave all who witnessed it an impression of the 
tremendous energy General Foch has for the 
command of enormous material difficulties." 



XV 

SENT NORTH TO SAVE THE CHAN- 
NEL PORTS 

GERMANY'S plan to enter France by 
the east gate, in Lorraine, was frus- 
trated with the aid of Foch. 

Her plan to smash through the center of 
the armies on the Marne was frustrated, with 
the very special aid of Foch. 

Blocked in both these moves, there was just 
one other for Germany to make, then, on the 
western front. 

And on September 14, Joffre, instead of 
celebrating the victory on the Marne, was deep 
in plans to forestall an advance upon the Chan- 
nel ports, and began issuing orders for the 
transfer of his main fighting bodies to the 
north. 

All this, of course, had to be done so as to 

127 



128 FOCH THE MAN 

leave no vulnerable spot in all that long battle 
line from Belfort to Calais. 

Joffre had clearly foreseen the length of 
that line. He predicted it, as we have seen, 
in 1 9 12. Doubtless he had foreseen also that 
it would be too long a line to direct from one 
viewpoint, from one general headquarters. 
What he was too wise to try to foresee before 
the war began was, which one of France's 
trained fighting men he would call to his aid 
as his second in command. He waited, and 
watched, before deciding that. 

And late in the afternoon of October 4 he 
telegraphed to General Foch at Chalons, tell- 
ing him that he was appointed first in com- 
mand under the generalissimo, and asking him 
to leave at once for the north, there to co- 
ordinate the French, English and Belgian 
forces that were opposing the German march 
to the sea. 

Five weeks previously Foch had been called 
to the vicinity of Chalons to assemble an army 
just coming into existence. Now he was called 
to leave Chalons and that army he had come 
to know — ^that army of which he must have 



TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS 129 

been so very, very proud — and go far away to 
another task of unknown factors. 

But in a few hours he had his affairs in 
order and was ready to leave. 

It was ten o'clock that Sunday night when 
he got into his automobile to be whirled from 
the Marne to the Somme. 

At four in the morning he was at Breteuil, 
where General Castelnau had the headquarters 
of his new army, created on September 20 and 
designated to service on Manoury's left. Gen- 
eral Castelnau had not yet heard of the gen- 
eralissimo's new order. He was sound asleep 
when the big gray car came to a stop at the 
door of his headquarters after its one-hundred- 
and-fifty-mile dash through silent towns and 
dark, war-invested country. 

Six weeks ago Foch had been his subordi- 
nate. Then they became equals in command. 
Now the magnificent hero of Lorraine who, 
before the war, had done so much on the 
Superior War Council to aid Joffre in reorgan- 
izing the army, rose from his bed in the chill 
of a fall morning not yet dawned, to greet his 
superior officer. 



130 FOCH THE MAN 

Some black coffee was heated for them, and 
for two hours they discussed the problems of 
this new front — Castelnau as eager to serve 
under Foch, for France, as, eight weeks ago, 
Foch had been to serve under Castelnau. If 
the sublime unselfishness of such men could 
have communicated itself to some of the minor 
figures of this war, how much more inspiring 
might be the stories of these civilian com- 
manders ! 

At six o'clock Foch was under way again — 
to Amiens, Doullens, St. Pol, and then, at nine, 
to Aubigny, where General Maud'huy had the 
headquarters of his army, holding the line 
north of Castelnau's. 

The difficulties of Foch's new undertaking 
were not military alone, but diplomatic. He 
had to take account of the English and Belgian 
armies, each under independent command, and 
each small. It was the fitness of Foch for the 
diplomacy needed here, as well as his fitness 
for the great military task of barring the 
enemy from the Channel ports, that deter- 
mined Joffre in nominating him to the place. 

In 1 9 12 General Foch had been the head 



TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS 131 

of the French military commission sent to wit- 
ness the British army maneuvers at Cambridge. 

He speaks no English; and not many Brit- 
ish generals at that time spoke much French. 
Yet he somehow managed to get on, with the 
aid of interpreters, so that his relations with 
the British officers were not only cordial, in a 
superficial social way, but important in their 
results of deepened understanding on his part 
and of respect on theirs. 

His study of what seemed to him the mili- 
tary strength and weakness of France^s great 
neighbor and ally was minute and comprehen- 
sive. 

In his opinion, the soldiers of Britain were 
excellent; but he was fearful that their com- 
manders lacked seasoned skill to direct them 
effectively. This lack he laid to that apparent 
inability to believe in the imminence of war, 
which was even more prevalent in Britain, with 
her centuries of inviolate security, than in 
France. 

Two years before the long-suspended sword 
fell, Foch foresaw clearly what would be the 
difficulties in the way of England when she 



132 FOCH THE MAN 

should gird herself for land conflict Doubt- 
less he had resolved in his mind plans for help- 
ing her to meet and to overcome them. 

Now he was placed where he could render 
aid — -where he must render aid. 

After the Battle of the Mame Sir John 
French wanted his army moved up north, 
nearer to its channel communications — ^that is 
to say, to its source of supplies. And on 
October i Joffre began to facilitate this move- 
ment. It was just well under way when Foch 
arrived in the north. 

And on October 9 the gallant Belgian army 
withdrew from Antwerp and made its way to 
the Yser under cover of French and British 
troops. 

Foch soon saw that an allied offensive would 
not be possible then ; that the most they could 
hope to do was to hold back the invading 
forces. 

Until October 24 he remained at Doullens, 
twenty miles north of Amiens. Then he 
removed his headquarters to the ancient town 
of Cassel, about eighteen miles west and a 
little south of Ypres. 



TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS 133 

From there he was able to reach in a few 
hours' time any strategic part of the north 
front and from this actual watch-tower (Cas- 
sel is on an isolated hill more than 500 feet 
high, and commands views of portions of 
France, Belgium, and even — on a clear day — 
of the chalky cliffs of England; St. Omer, 
Dunkirk, Ypres, and Ostend are all visible 
from its heights), he was to direct movements 
affecting the destinies of all three nations. 

The Belgians, whose sublime stand had 
thwarted Germany's murderous plan against 
an unready world, were a sad little army when 
they reached the Yser about mid October. It 
was not what they had endured that contrib- 
uted most to break their spirit; but what they 
had been imable to prevent. 

To those heroic men who had left their 
beautiful country to the arch-fiends of de- 
struction, their parents and wives and children 
to savages who befoul the name of beasts ; who 
no longer had any possessions, nor munitions 
wherewith to make another stand on Belgian 
soil ; to them Foch took fresh inspiration with 
his calm and tremendous personaHty; to them 



134 FOCH THE MAN 

he sent his splendid Forty-second Division to 
swell their ranks so frightfully depleted in 
Honor's cause ; to them he gave the suggestion 
of opening their sluices and drowning out of 
their last little corner of Belgium the enemy 
they could not otherwise dislodge. 

This done, the next problem of Foch was 
to establish relations with Sir John French 
whereby the most cordial and complete co- 
operation might be insured between the 
British Field Marshal and the French com- 
mander of the armies in the north. 

There are several graphic accounts of inter- 
views which took place between these generals. 

It was on October 28 that Foch saw the 
success of the opened sluices and the conse- 
quent salvation to the heroic Belgians of a 
corner of their own earth whereon to maintain 
their sovereignty. 

On the 30th the English suffered severe re- 
verses in spite of the aid lent them by eight 
battalions of French soldiers and artillery re- 
inforcements. In consequence, they had had 
to cede considerable ground, their line was 



TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS 135 

pierced, and the flank of General Dubois' army, 
adjoining theirs, was menaced. 

When word of this disaster reached Foch 
that night he at once set out from Cassel for 
French's headquarters at Saint Omer. 

It was I A.M. when he arrived. Marshal 
French was asleep. He was waked to receive 
his visitor. 

"Marshal," said Foch, "your line is 
cracked?" 

"Yes." 

"Have you any resources?" 

"I have none." 

"Then I give you mine; the gap must be 
stopped at once; if we allow our lines to be 
pierced at a single point we are lost, because 
of the masses our enemy has to pour through 
it. I have eight battalions of the Thirty-sec- 
ond Division that General Joffre has sent me. 
Take them and go forward!" 

The offer was most gratefully received. At 
two o'clock the orders were given; the gap 
was stopped. 

Nevertheless, the British despaired of their 



136 FOCH THE MAN 

ability to hold. Marshal French had no re- 
serves, and decided to fall back. 

A liaison officer hastened to notify General 
Dubois that the British were about to retire, 
and General Dubois betook himself in all 
speed to Vlamertinghe, the Belgian headquar- 
ters, to notify their commanding general. 
Foch happened to be with the Belgian general. 
And while these three were conferring, the 
liaison officer (Jamet) saw the automobile of 
Marshal French pass by. 

Realizing the importance of the British com- 
mander's presence at that interview, Jamet 
ventured to stop him and suggest his attend- 
ance. 

Foch implored French to prevent retreat. 
French declared there was nothing else for him 
to do — his men were exhausted, he had no 
reserves. Foch pointed out to him the incal- 
culable consequences of yielding. 

"It is necessary to hold in spite of every- 
thing!" he cried; "to hold until death. What 
you propose would mean a catastrophe. Hold 
on! ni help you." 

And as he talked he wrote his suggestions 



TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS 137 

on a piece of paper he found on the table 
before him, and passed it to the British com- 
mander. 

. Marshal French read what was written, at 
once added to it, "execute the order of General 
Foch," signed it, and gave it to one of his 
staff officers. 

And the Channel ports were saved. 

But a greater thing even than that was fore- 
shadowed: Foch had begun to demonstrate 
what was in him before which not only the 
men of his command must bow but the gen- 
erals of other nations also. 

One of the staff officers of General Foch 
who was closely associated with him there in 
the north in that time of great anxiety, 
has given us a pen-picture of the chief as his 
aides often saw him then. Doubtless it is a 
good picture also, except for differences in 
trifling details, of the great commander as he 
has been on many and many a night since, 
while the destinies of millions hung in the bal- 
ance of his decisions. 

"All is silence. The little town of Cassel is 
early asleep. On the rough pavement of the 



138 FOCH THE MAN 

Grande Place, occasional footsteps break the 
stillness. Now they are those of a staff officer 
on his way to his billet. Now it is the sentry 
moving about to warm himself up a bit. Then 
silence again. 

"In a little office of the Hotel de Ville, a 
man is seated at a table. His elbows are on 
a big military map. A telephone is at his 
hand. He waits — to hear the results of orders 
he has given. And while he waits he chews 
an unlighted cigar and divides his attention 
between the map and the clock — ^an old Louis 
XVI timepiece with marble columns, which 
ticks off the minutes almost soundlessly. How 
slowly its hands go round ! How interminable 
seems the wait for news ! 

"Someone knocks, and Colonel Weygand, 
chief of staff, enters; he has a paper in his 
hand: Telephoned from the Ninth army at 
1. 15 A.M.' . . . 

"The general has raised his head; his eyes 
are shining. 

"'Good! goodr 

"His plans are working out successfully; the 
reinforcements he sent for have arrived in 



TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS 139 

time. There is nothing more he can do now; 
so he will go to bed. 

"A last look at the map. Then his eye- 
glasses, at the end of their string, are tucked 
away in the upper pocket of his coat. The 
general puts on his black topcoat and his cap. 

*Tn the hall, the gendarme on guard duty 
gets up, quickly, from the chair wherein he is 
dozing. 

'The general salutes him with a brisk ges- 
ture, but with it he seems to say: 'Sleep on, 
my good fellow; I'm sorry to have disturbed 
you.' 

"At the foot of the grand staircase, the 
sentry presents arms; and one of the staff 
officers joins the commander, to accompany 
him to the house of the notary who is extend- 
ing him hospitality. 

"A few hours later, very early in the morn- 
ing, the general is back again at his office." 

Thus he was at Cassel, as he directed those 
operations on the Yser by which he checked 
the German attempt to reach Calais and Dun- 
kirk, and revealed to the military world a new 
strategist of the first order. 



140 FOCH THE MAN 

By November 15 (six weeks after arriving 
in the north) Foch had the high command of 
the German army as completely thwarted in 
its design as it had been at the Marne. It had 
fallen to Foch to defeat the German plan on 
the east (Lorraine), in the center (Marne) 
and on the west (Ypres). And the conse- 
quences of this frustration that he dealt them 
in Flanders were calculated to be "at least 
equal to the victory of the Marne." Colonel 
Requin calls that Battle of the Yser "like a 
preface to the great victory of 1918.'* 

In the spring of 191 5 Foch left Cassel and 
took up headquarters at Frevent, between 
Amiens and Doullens, whence he directed 
those engagements in Artois which demon- 
strated that though trench warfare was not the 
warfare he had studied and prepared for, and 
nearly all its problems were new, he was master 
of it not less than he would have been of a 
cavalry warfare. 

In the autumn of 19 15, Foch moved nearer 
to Amiens — to the village of Dury in the im- 
mediate outskirts of the ancient capital of 
Picardy. For the next chapter in his history 
was to be the campaign of the Somme includ- 



TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS 141 

ing the first great offensive of France in the 
war, which, together with the Verdun defense, 
forced the Germans not only again to re-make 
their calculations, but to withdraw to the Hin- 
denburg line. 

On September 30, 1916 (just before his 
sixty-fifth birthday, on which his retirement 
from active service was due), he was "retained 
without age limit" in the first section of the 
general staff of the French army. 

Honors were beginning to crowd upon him 
as the debt of France and of her allies to his 
genius began to be realized. Responsibility 
vested in him became heavier and heavier as 
he demonstrated his ability to bear it. But 
always, say those who were nearest him, 
"a great, religious serenity pervaded and illu- 
mined his soul." 

This is a serenity not of physical calm. Foch 
is intensely nervous, almost ceaselessly active. 
His body is frail, racked with suffering, worn 
down by the enormous strains imposed upon 
it. But the self-mastery within is always ap- 
parent ; and it inspires confidence, and renewed 
effort, in all who come in contact with him. 



XVI 

THE SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE 
ALLIED ARMIES 

AFTER his position in the first section 
of the General Staff had been made 
independent of age limits, General 
Foch was relieved ( for the autumn and winter 
at least, during which time no operations of 
importance were expected) of active command 
of a group of armies; and at once began the 
organization of a bureau devoted to the study 
of great military questions affecting not the 
French lines alone but those of France's allies. 
At first the headquarters of this bureau 
were at Senlis, near Paris. Then they were 
moved close to France's eastern border where 
Foch and his associates studied ways and 
means of meeting a possible attack through 
Switzerland — if Germany resolved to add that 

142 




(C) Undenvood and Underwood 

General Petain — Marshal Haig — General Foch- 
General Pershing 



c3> 



THE SUPREME COMMANDER 143 

crime to her category — or across northern 
Italy. 

So clearly had Foch foreseen what would 
happen in the Venetian plain, that he had his 
plan of French reinforcement perfected long 
in advance, even to the schedule for dispatch- 
ing troop trains to the Piave front. 

In January, 19 17, Marshal Joffre reached 
the age of retirement (65). He was venerated 
and loved throughout France as few men have 
ever been. Gratitude for his great gifts and 
great character filled every heart to overflow- 
ing. His country had no honor great enough 
to express its sense of his service to France. 
Yet it was felt that for the operations of the 
future, the interests of France and of her 
aUies would be best furthered with another 
strategist in command of the armies in the 
field. Joff re's retirement was therefore effected. 

Joffre is an enginee a master-builder of 
fortifications, a great defense soldier. But 
defense would not end the war. France must 
look to her greatest offensive strategist. 

There could be no question who that strate- 
gist was. No one knew it quite so well as 



144 FOCH THE MAN 

Marshal Joffre. And one of the most splendid 
things about that mighty and noble man is 
the spirit in which he concurred in (if, in- 
deed, he did not suggest) the change which 
meant that another should lead the armies of 
France to victory. 

The appointment of General Foch as head 
of the General Staff was made on May 15, 
191 7, while Marshal Joffre was in the United 
States to confer with our officials regarding 
our part in the war. On the same date General 
Philippe Petain, the heroic defender of Ver- 
dun, who had been Chief of Staff for a month, 
was appointed Commander-in-Chief of all 
French armies operating on the French front. 

General Foch installed himself at the In- 
valides, and addressed himself to the study of 
all the allies' fronts, the assembling American 
army, and to another task for which he was 
signally fitted: that of coordinating the plans 
and purposes of the Generalissimo and the 
government. 

Wherever General Foch goes, one finds him 
creating harmony and, through harmony, 
doubling everyone's strength. 



THE SUPREME COMMANDER 145 

He "gets on" with everybody, but not in the 
way that sort of thing is too generally done 
— not by methods which have come to be called 
diplomatic and which involve a great deal of 
surface affability, of wordy beating about the 
bush and concealing one's real purposes from 
persons who see his hand and wonder if they 
are bluffing him about theirs. 

Foch has no stomach for this sort of thing. 
His whole bent is toward discovering the right 
thing to do and then making it so plain to 
others that it is the right thing that they adopt 
it gladly and cooperate in it with ardor. 

In council he is still the great teacher striv- 
ing always not merely to make his principles 
remembered, but to have them shared. 

The eminent French painter, Lucien Jonas, 
who has served in Artois, at Verdun, on the 
Somme and in Italy, and has been appointed 
painter of the Army Museum at Des Invalides, 
was commissioned to make a picture of Gen- 
eral Foch holding an allies* council of war at 
Versailles. 

It was, of course, impossible for Jonas to 
be actually present at a council meeting. But 



146 FOCH THE MAN 

it was arranged that he should sit outside a 
glass door through which he could see all, but 
hear nothing. 

"General Foch," he tells us, "held his audi- 
tors in a sort of fascination. One felt that in 
his explanations there was not a flaw, not a 
hesitancy. All seemed clear, plain, irresist- 
ible." 

This power was his in great degree in the 
years before the war. But now men who listen 
to him know that his perceptions are not 
merely logical — they are workable. His per- 
formances prove the worth of his theories. 

On March 21, 19 18, Ludendorff launched 
his great offensive against the British army. 
The line bent; it cracked. Amiens seemed 
doomed ; the British in France were threatened 
with severance from their allies — with envel- 
opment ! 

After four days of onrushing disaster a con- 
ference was called to meet at Doullens — 3, con- 
ference of representatives of the allied govern- 
ments. Something must be done to coordi- 
nate the various "fronts," to put them under 
a supreme command. 



THE SUPREME COMMANDER 147 

Foch was hastily empowered to order what- 
ever he deemed advisable to prevent the sepa- 
ration of the English and French armies. It 
is apparent that the wide powers thus hurriedly 
given to him were bestowed with the approval 
of every member of the conference. In 
October, 1918, however, in responding to a 
note of greeting from Lloyd-George on the 
occasion of his sixty-seventh birthday, Foch 
recognized the weight of the British Prime 
Minister's influence at the conference: 

"I am greatly touched," he replied, "by your 
congratulations and thank you sincerely. 

"I do not forget that it was to your in- 
sistence that I owe the position which I occupy 
to-day." 

Foch's new responsibilities were laid upon 
him on March 26. By evening of the 
28th he had the situation so well in hand that 
he was able to hold in check the German on- 
slaught without even employing all the troops 
he had brought up for that purpose. He had 
averted what threatened to be the worst dis- 
aster of the war, and he had reserves in readi- 



148 FOCH THE MAN 

ness against a new and augmented attack. 
This in two days ! 

On the 30th an official announcement told 
all the world that the destinies of the allied 
armies were by common consent confided to 
the general direction of Ferdinand Foch. 

On that same day there was made public, 
by the French war authorities, something 
which had taken place and had contributed in 
a degree we are not yet able to state, to the 
investment of Foch with supreme power. This 
was a visit made by General Pershing to Foch. 
In the presence of Foch, Petain, Clemenceau 
and Loucheur (Minister of Munitions) Per- 
shing made the following declaration: 

"I come to tell you that the American people 
would hold it a great honor if our troops were 
engaged in the present battle. I ask you this 
in my name and in theirs. At this moment 
there is nothing to be thought of but combat. 
Infantry, artillery, aviation — all that we have 
is yours. Use them as you will. There are 
more to come — as many more as shall be 
needed. I am here solely to say to you that 
the American people will be proud to be en- 




(C) Undeneood and Underwood 

General Foch General Pershing 



THE SUPREME COMMANDER 149 

gaged in the greatest and most glorious battle 
in history/' 

It would not be possible for Marshal Foch 
to make any statement or give any special evi- 
dence, now, revealing what he thinks of any 
of the allied commanders fighting with him. 
Doubtless he has high respect and regard for 
them all. But I cannot help hazarding a guess 
that he finds General Pershing peculiarly to 
his liking and admiration, and that they com- 
prehend each other almost without need of 
explanations. 

We do know, however, what the French peo- 
ple think of Pershing's action in putting him- 
self and all that he commands under the direct- 
ing will of Foch. Their word for his behavior 
is **superb." 

And that there will be any difference of 
opinion between Foch and Pershing over the 
essentials of victory seems quite beyond the 
probabilities. 

I have tried to give some slight impression 
of the manner of man he is to whose broad 
statesmanship, great generalship and high 
moral perceptions we have so gladly, con- 



150 FOCH THE MAN 

fidently intrusted decisions affecting not only 
our destiny alone, but that of generations yet 
unborn. 

I might, in these last paragraphs, essay a 
summary of what I have felt about Foch dur- 
ing the period I have been exclusively occu- 
pied with reading about him, thinking about 
him, writing about him. 

But it seems to me much more fitting to give 
the impressions of some of those who 
have been in personal contact with him. 

On April 5, a week after his appointment 
to the supreme command was announced, he 
granted an interview to a group of war cor- 
respondents. Their various accounts differ 
very slightly. Instead of quoting any one I 
will make a digest of them. 

They found the general installed in a pro- 
vincial mansion, place not named. The room 
he occupied was nearly bare; an old table, an 
armchair^ a telephone, a huge war map, no 
profusion of papers, no "air of importance." 

Foch was writing in a notebook. He rose, 
when he had finished his entry among those 
epoch-making memoranda, and received his 



THE SUPREME COMMANDER 151 

visitors. He had but a few minutes to give, 
yet he realized the importance of the occasion 
and treated it accordingly. These men were 
to send to millions of people in the great de- 
mocracies of France, Britain and America 
their pen pictures of the man just invested 
with the greatest military responsibility any 
man in the world's history has ever borne. 
Battles must be fought, but also those people 
had a right to such a sense of participation 
as only their press could give them; it was 
their issue; their attitude toward it was the 
foundation of their nation's morale. Foch has 
neither time nor taste for talk about himself, 
but he is no war autocrat; he is, as he con- 
stantly reiterates, a son of France, defending 
human liberties. He might not have much 
time to give journalists, but it is not in him 
to minimize their place in a world where the 
will of the majority prevails and the press does 
much to shape that will. 

His manner on that occasion was calm, un- 
hurried, but very direct, to the point. 

"Well, gentlemen,^' said he, "our affairs are 
not going badly; are they? The boche has 



15^ FOCH THE MAN 

been halted since March 27. He has, doubt- 
less, encountered some obstacle. We have 
stopped him. Now we shall endeavor to do 
better. I do not see that there is anything 
more to say. 

"But as to yourselves, keep at your task. 
It is a time when everyone ought to work 
steadfastly. Work with your pens. We will 
go on working with our arms." 

*'I regret," wrote Lieutenant d'Entraygues 
in the Paris Temps, "only one thing: that all 
the people of France were not able to see and 
hear this soldier as he spoke to us. They 
would know why it is not possible to doubt 
our victory." 

That the work did go on, that Marshal Foch 
and all under his command kept at their task 
until the glorious consummation was reached, 
all the world has acclaimed. 

As an editorial writer in the New York 
Evenmg Sun says: "We do not know what 
the judgments of military critics will be when 
they have carefully studied and sifted the evi- 
dence, but to a layman it looks as if Foch 
was not merely a very great general but one 



THE SUPREME COMMANDER 153 

of the greatest generals of all recorded history 
... as great a general as Napoleon or Caesar 
or Hannibal or Alexander." 

All honor to Foch the man, a Frenchman of 
great gifts and great ideals but as modest as 
he is capable and conscientious. 

We may not be privileged to meet our hero 
face to face, but we may in these momentous 
times think of him as Rene Puaux describes 
him: 

''No man is more modest, more simple. Above 
the indomitable energy which characterizes him 
there is a sad tenderness, a grand melancholy. 

"I seem again to see him going, alone, to 
the church at Cassel, when it was deserted, 
there to meditate on his task and to seek com- 
fort for the great grief of which he never 
spoke. 

"At times his eyes seemed to say: *Young 
men, you do not know what a father suffers 
when mourning has entered his home to bide 
there forever. My only son is taken, and one 
of my daughters is widowed. I shall find in 
my home, which I left in the joyousness of 



154 FOCH THE MAN 

a midsummer Sunday, little orphans who have, 
never even known their fathers. 

"1 approach the twilight of my life with 
the consciousness of a good servant who will 
rest in the peace of his Lord. Faith in eternal 
life, in a good and merciful God, has sustained 
me in the hardest hours. Prayer has illumined 
my soul. 

" 'Our France has been torn and murdered. 
There are thousands and thousands of old 
fathers who, like me, have lost all they loved 
best, all the hope of their race. I am one with 
them at heart. I know what they suffer. 

" *But we have no right, now, to think about 
ourselves. The cause of our country is 
greater. 

" *Over there, among the enemy, emperors 
and bedizened princes — all well shielded from 
danger — prance about and make great political 
capital of sending their subjects to be massacred. 

" 'We, here, are humble sons of the soil of 
France, who defend our liberties. Each one 
does his best. I know that we shall have the 
victory. It will be complete, and our dead 
will be avenged. But it is necessary to work, 



THE SUPREME COMIVIANDER 155 

to fight on, to meet, with all the resources of 
French spirit, the shocks of the barbarian 
masses. Spirit will conquer matter. 

" Without a high ideal, without a spiritual 
conception of life, it is not possible to rise 
above feebleness and discouragement. Great 
sacrifices are demanded of you, young men, 
they will be demanded of you to the end. 
Accept them as I have accepted mine. Not 
only our France but all humanity is at stake. 
Liberty must triumph first. Afterward we 
may weep in our silent homes over which float 
the standards of victory.* " 

It is thus I would help you to think of him: 
mighty in spirit, strong in faith, supreme in 
strategy, immensely broad in understanding — 
a very great man; but too great a man to be 
a "superman"; and withal, a tender, heart- 
broken old father to whom the laying down 
of arms means not the leisure to wear laurels, 
but the right to sit again by his hearth, now 
desolate, and think back on happy days and 
forward to a reassembled group in the house 
not made with hands. 

Printed in the United States of America S 



H 15 v-89 .M 



-:♦ ** % V 













..**\.i^'X. /*'^;^'> ,//^<.\ 






'bV' 



\/^\/ V^^*/ V^^^ 


















^> 4 









^oV 



.-iq. 



o 1> 



Pv\. 



^- ^ 



': A^^h^. 



.<bvO. 



*" «5>^^^^. ^ww^: ^^ 



y 



o > 






A* VAvl-"^^. ^^^\-:i(S^*.V .*''^!k•i^/'^ 









*■ ^ 

-^v^ 










- * 4 O^ •4 



• ** 



q, .*.T 



V *^-*\y %'^. 






^^ /Jife*-^ \..^^^ :m£:' %,♦* /^^\ \, 






\ ''J^/^'^^^'\ '-j^p-/ /'"% °.W«^-' 4:^^■ 



^. iP-Jt, 



.4>* .>Va\ ^^^^^« .»^-, \/ y^^ u^ 






-•* .^^ ^- 






JyJ^^'^.. ..^^:k•i^/> ,.-\^;a^^\, 



♦^ .♦ 



^-./ ♦ 
>A, 



•*;.<^' 






ECKMAN 
^DERY INC. |§ 

^ 1989 






<> ♦-TTi* <0^ 



^> -^ • • • ' .U ^^ 'o , t - .»> 









